Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/mylifewitheskimo01stef 






MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK ■ BOSTON ■ CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



MY LIFE WITH THE 
ESKIMO 



BY 

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON 



ILLUSTBATED 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1913 

All rights reserved 






Copyright, 1912, 1913, 
By harper & BROTHERS. 



Copyright, 1913, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 19 



NorfaDOll ^KS3 

J. S. Gushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



,<DC!.A35 76 74 



NOTE . 

The publishers regret that owing to Mr. Stefansson's 
departure on his new expedition to the far North he was 
unable to read the final proofs of this volume. 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Building a Snow House — Mackenzie Eskimo .... Frontispiece / 

FACING PAGE 

York Boat going over Cascade Rapid, Athabasca 1 o 

Scow running Boiler Rapid, Athabasca j 

Fleet of Scows and "Model Boats " going down Athabasca, 1906 1 ,q 

Funeral of Herbert Bray, May, 1906 J ^ 

Cooking with Driftwood, Mackenzie Delta 1 oq 

Skinning a Bearded Seal j '■' 

Ruins of Amundsen's House at King Point, occupied 1905-06 1 „-, 

Grave of Wiik at King Point j ^ 

Sunday, July 26, 1908, at Shingle Point 40 .. 

Most Northerly White Man's Dwelling on the Continent .... 44 

Mackenzie River House in Summer 1 

A Woman dancing to the Accompaniment of Singing and Drum Beat- i 60 

ing — Flaxman Island, 1908 j 

Sledging over Barren Ground in Summer 70 

Camp on Sea Ice when Open Lead prevented getting Ashore ] o^ ' 

Camp in Woods of Horton River j j. 

A Dead Caribou 1 ,q2 

Natkusiak shooting a Sleeping Seal j 

The Adaptability of the Skin Boat 112 

Tracking Umiak by Dog Team near Langton Bay 124 

Mud Volcano between Darnley Bay and Langton Bay 1 ^.^ 

Our Camp, Langton Bay, in Summer (1911) j 

" Rosie H." in Winter Quarters 1 i cq 

Wreck of Steam Whaler " Alexander " J 

When we shot a Seal during the Day he was dragged along behind the 

Sled till Camp Time 162 

Our Sled at a Permanently Deserted Snow Village 1 yjo 

Temporarily Deserted Village j 

Village, Dolphin and Union Straits, Early May 1 yj^ 

A Stone House of Unknown Origin j 

Watching the Arrival of Visitors 1 j^gQ 

Bowmen hunting Ptarmigan J 

Mamayauk 184. 

A Group of Victoria Land Eskimo . . . . ' . . . . 194 
Our Camp in the Interior of Victoria Island j 

Coming Home from a Successful Bearded Seal Hunt — Each Dog drag- | 200 

ging a Segment of the Seal J 

vii 



'V 



viii ILLUSTRATIONS 

FACING PAGE 

Ekalukpik , . . . . 206'' 

Cooking with Heather in Spring 1 2IOV 

Cooking with Dwarf Willows in Spring on the Shore of a Frozen Lake j 

Scene crossing Victoria Island 226'' 

Rough Ice on Coppermine 1 238^ 

Eskimo wearing Snow Goggles J 

Traveling on the Coppermine River in Spring 240 

Meat Caches and Traps set to guard them 246 . 

Three-roomed Dwelling, Coronation Gulf 256v 

Boys of Eight and Six Years, Coronation Gulf 260./ 

Eskimo skinning the First Caribou they had seen shot with a Rifle 1 _ 266 
Spring Tent of Eskimo, South Shore of Coronation Gulf, Late April J 

Coronation Gulf Hunters with Bows and Arrows 1 268. 

Palaiyak and Nogasak J 

On Sea Ice 272.^ 

Crowd at our Tent, June 14, 1913 | 

The Largest Copper Eskimo Village we ever visited — Twenty -seven 274, 

Snow Houses and Tents J 

Three Women of Prince Albert Sound 276 ^' 

A Village of Twenty-seven Deserted and Three Occupied Houses . . 278 ■/ 

Prince Albert Sound Young Women • • 280 

Prince Albert Sound Women and One Man 282 , 

Hitkoak, Alunak and Pamiungittok I 284'/ '] 

A Coronation Gulf Family J 

Prince Albert Sound Men and One Woman 292 

Prince Albert Sound Group, all of whom show Blond Tendencies . . 296 ^ ^ 
Prince Albert Sound — Spring House, Sled, and Dogs . . . .300^-^ 

Beacon built on Bell Island 1 306 , 

Coronation Gulf Eskimo Men's Styles in Dress J 

Skinning a Large Bear . 

The Part that went to waste because our Party was too Small to eat or 312 

haul the Meat J 

The Story of a Forgotten Tragedy | 314./ 

Skinning a Seal for Supper j 

Richardson's Drawing and Three Photographs of the Same Place . . 316w 

Water on Top Solid Sea Ice in June 322, 

Loose Ice Cake forming Bridge across Lead J 

Sledging across Barren Ground in June is Hot AVork . . • • 324 * 

Drying Clothes and Ethnological Specimens after traveling over Water- ' 

covered Ice [ • 

The Cache J 

Bringing Ashore a Bearded Seal at Langton Bay 332 

The " Teddy Bear " . . • • ^^^ " 

The March across Barren Ground | _ _ ^ ^ . 338 ' 

Camp Breaking and preparing Packs for Travel 



346, 



ILLUSTRATIONS ix 

TAOING PAGE 

Frame of Coal Creek House, 1911-12 

Dease River House, February, 1911 

Dease River House, May, 1911 

Ruins (1910) of House occupied in 1908-09 

Coal Seam, Coal Creek 1 o^^ 

Smoking Mountains (Burning Coal Mines), Franklin Bay J 

Sections of Underground Ice Bowlders exposed in Cutbank, Pitt Point 1 004 ; 

One Method of Formation of Undergrouud Ice j 

Searching for Archaeological Specimens at Cape Smythe .... 388 

Columnar Basalt underlaid by Stratified Limestone 

A View of Two Islands from the Southwest, the Nearer One a Half- 
mile distant 

Setting Fish Net underneath the Ice in Spring, Mackenzie Delta, 
June 7, 1910 

Setting Gill Nets in Summer, Richard Island, Mackenzie Delta, Sep- 
tember 18, 1909 

A Day's Catch on the Hula-Hula River, Alaska (mostly Salmon Trout) 

Male Willow Ptarmigan in Early Plumage, Dease River, May, 1911 1 

Female Rock Ptarmigan, Coronation Gulf [ . 460 

Nest of Rock Ptarmigan, near Franklin Bay, June 17, 1911 J 

Leaving our Winter Sheep-hunting Camp, Hula-Hula River, Alaska, 
March, 1909 

Male Barren Ground Bear, Horton River, N. W. T. 

Head of Northern Mountain Sheep (Ram), Hula-Hula River, Endicott 
Mountains, Alaska, 1909 

Polar Bears swimming at Sea near Cape Parry, August, 1911 

Map of the Arctic Coast of Alaska and Northwestern Canada, showing 
the Route of the Stefansson-Anderson Expedition, 1908-12. 

Map of Victoria Island and Adjacent Regions, with Approximate Addi- 
tions and Corrections, and Eskimo names, by V. Stefd,nsson. 



442 



450 



518 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

CHAPTER I 

THE plans of my second expedition took gradual shape during 
the years 1906-1907, while I was still north of the Arctic 
circle engaged in the work of my first expedition. 
It was once intended that I should be the ethnologist of the 
Leffingwell-Mikkelsen Arctic Expedition, sometimes known as the 
Anglo-American Polar Expedition, which sailed from Victoria, 
British Columbia, in the spring of 1906, When the proposal was 
made to me I found it an attractive one in everything except this : 
that the expedition's schooner, the Duchess of Bedford, was unpro- 
vided with auxiliary motive power, and my book knowledge of Arctic 
conditions made me fear that she would never reach the proposed 
site of operations, the west coast of Victoria Island. Mr. Leffing- 
well and I therefore agreed that I should not join the expedition in 
Victoria as did its other members, but should go overland and 
down the Mackenzie River to meet them at Herschel Island, which 
lies about eighty miles west of the Mackenzie delta. My reason 
was that if the expedition failed to get so far east I should be able 
to occupy my time profitably in the study of the scientifically un- 
known Mackenzie Eskimo. On the other hand, if nothing obstructed 
the expedition I should be able to join it in early August and 
proceed with it eastward toward Victoria Island. It turned out 
that the Duchess of Bedford had good fortune until she reached 
Point Barrow. At that point the ice blocked her further advance 
until the season had become late and she was finally overtaken 
by winter on the north coast of Alaska at Flaxman Island. She 
was never able, therefore, to pick me up, and I consequently never 
became a member of the expedition. From the point of view of 
the ethnologist, this was a very fortunate circumstance. Although 
I had always doubted that the ship would come to pick me up, I 
had nevertheless intrusted my entire outfit to her, for I wanted, if 
B 1 



2 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

I lived with the Eskimo at all, to live exactly as one of them, in 
their houses, dressing like them, and eating only such food as they 
did. I now found myself, in accord with my own plan, set down 
two hundred miles north of the polar circle, with a summer suit of 
clothing, a camera, some notebooks, a rifle, and about two hundred 
rounds of ammunition, facing an Arctic winter, where my only 
shelter would have to be the roof of some hospitable Eskimo house. 
These were ideal conditions for me. Had I had my own party 
and my own house I should have lived near the Eskimo instead of 
with them. I should have seen them as an outsider, a stranger. 
If I had visited them now and then, I should have found them 
wearing their company manners and should have obtained no better 
insight into their lives than does the ordinary missionary or trader. 
Now my very poverty was my greatest advantage ; I was not rich 
and powerful like the whaling captains or mounted policemen, so 
there was no reason why they should flatter me or show me defer- 
ence. I had no visible means, and therefore what they did for me 
was without hope of reward. They took me into their houses and 
treated me hospitably and courteously, but exactly as if I were one 
of them. They gave me clothes to wear and food to eat, I helped 
them in their work and joined in their games, until they gradually 
forgot that I was not one of them, and began to live their lives 
before my eyes as if I were not there. This gave me a rare oppor- 
tunity to know them as they are. 

The details of that winter are not a part of the present story, 
although the things I learned have not only been useful to me since, 
but have also furnished the incentive to five years of further ex- 
ploration. To begin with, I found that the Eskimo language, 
although exceedingly difficult for a European to learn, was not 
impossible of acquisition, for at the end of a winter in the house 
of the Mackenzie Eskimo I already had a good foundation in it. 
The people, too, were agreeable. They were not only interesting 
from a scientific point of view, as all primitive people must be to 
the student of mankind, but they were cheerful, self-reliant, and 
admirable companions. They are people among whom you might 
possibly have enemies and among whom you were certain to make 
friends; people very much hke you and me, but with the social 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 3 

virtues developed rather more highly than they have been among 
our own race. In a difficult struggle for existence under hard 
natural conditions they have acquired the ability to live together 
in peace and good will. 

But what led most definitely to the planning of my second expe- 
dition was that I learned that to the eastward of Cape Bathurst 
the Mackenzie Eskimo were unaware of the existence of any people. 
The coast of Dolphin and Union Straits had been mapped by Dr. 
John Richardson in 1826, but he had seen none of its inhabitants. 
My knowledge of the habits of the Eskimo led me to suspect that 
his finding no people was in itself no proof of the non-existence of 
people on this portion of the mainland, for he had skirted the coast 
in summer when the natives were likely to be inland caribou hunting. 
Further, the English explorers had seen Eskimo on Coronation Gulf 
and on Victoria Island in the first half of the eighteenth century, 
and these people had not been visited since. It would be interest- 
ing to revisit them after sixty years. At Herschel Island I hap- 
pened to meet Captain Amundsen on his way west from his now 
famous voyage of the Northwest Passage, and I found that he also 
had sailed past these shores without seeing any people and in fact 
without opportunity of seeing any. 

A whaling ship also brought news of interest. The schooner 
Olga, commanded by Captain Klinkenberg, had wintered somewhere 
to the eastward, and had seen Eskimo. The captain, when he landed 
at Herschel Island, announced that he had spent the winter on 
Banks Island. But this I think was believed by few of the whaling 
captains, and seemed entirely improbable to me, for his own descrip- 
tion of the country in which he had wintered showed clearly that it 
could have been no portion of Banks Island, unless indeed Banks 
Island were very different from the descriptions and charts we have 
of it. While no one could be certain, therefore, just where the Olga 
had wintered, it was generally agreed that it must have been some- 
where on Victoria Island, and the majority favored Minto Inlet, 
to which Captain Klinkenberg himself later on agreed. I shall not 
here take time by the forelock to say just where it eventually 
turned out that he had wintered, for we did not discover that 
interesting fact until May of 1911, but the important thing was 



4 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

that wherever it might have been, Captain Klinkenberg had there 
seen Eskimo who were armed with bows and arrows, who used 
copper implements, and who evidently had therefore been in no 
contact with white men in recent years. The white men and 
Eskimo of the crew of the Olga brought back many semi-fabulous 
stories which they had got from these Eskimo ; their divergence 
from actual truth is to be explained partly by the inability of the 
Alaskan Eskimo on the ship to understand the dialect of their 
eastern countrymen with whom they associated for only a few days 
all together. 

Shortly after my return from the first expedition in the early 
winter of 1907, my plans for scientific exploration in the Arctic were 
laid before Dr. Herman C. Bumpus, Director of the American 
Museum of Natural History. It seemed possible that there might 
exist on the north shore of the continent of America, and possibly 
on Banks Island and Victoria Island, people who had not seen a 
white man, either they or their ancestors, and there almost certainly 
were other people who themselves had not seen white men, although 
the ancestors of some of them might have been explorers of Frank- 
lin's own party or else men of the Franklin Search. True, some promi- 
nent authorities on the Eskimo did believe that the islands west of 
King William Island were inhabited. One of these men told me 
that I should certainly find no people on the west coast of Victoria 
Island, for all the Eskimo seen there by Collinson and M'Clure 
(1852-1853) had long ago moved east to Hudson Bay to trade with 
the whalers. Acting on these opinions, the Canadian Government 
had issued in 1906 a map on which the word "Uninhabited" is printed 
in red letters across the face of Victoria Island, where we eventually 
found a dense population, as Eskimo go. 

The scientific importance of the study of these people by an 
ethnologist was clear to Dr. Bumpus and appealed no less strongly 
to Dr. Clark Wissler, the Museum's curator of anthropology. 
They both assured me at once of their interest in my plans, and 
from that point on it was merely a question of financial detail to 
make the expedition a certainty. The funds were not available to 
support a large expedition; the purchase of a ship and its equip- 
ment with the customary paraphernalia of Arctic exploration were 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 5 

out of the question — neither did it seem necessary to have such 
complex equipment for so simple a task as that of ascertaining 
whether or not human beings live in a certain stretch of country. 
Our thesis was this : that we were not looking for any waste places, 
but for land occupied by human beings ; if those human beings were 
there at all, they must be Eskimo supporting themselves by the 
most primitive implements of the chase ; and it seemed clear that if 
Eskimo could live there, armed as they must be with bows and arrows, 
and not only live there but bring up their children and take care of 
their aged, then surely we, armed with modern rifles, would be 
able to live in that sort of country as long as we pleased and to go 
about in it as we liked. Of course the thesis was bound to 
prove out. 

I had at first considered going north alone, relying entirely on 
the support of the Mackenzie River Eskimo for my journey toward 
the eastward in the search of their hypothetical countrymen, but 
one day a letter came which changed my plans at once. I had often 
considered the possibility of taking some one with me, and in think- 
ing over all the available men whom I knew, I had always felt that 
one of them was qualified before all others, and the letter I got was 
from that very man. Dr. R. M. Anderson, a classmate in the Univer- 
sity of Iowa and a friend of mine for many years. I had known 
him in the University as one of those exceptional men who won 
honors both through scholarship and athletic ability. He had been 
captain of track teams ; he held various athletic records ; he was a 
crack rifle shot ; he was experienced in roughing it in various places, 
and had also been a soldier in the Spanish-American war ; he held 
the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and had written learned books 
and articles on birds and animals, and was now tired of civilization 
and eager for a chance to go north with me. As soon as I showed his 
letter to the Museum authorities it was agreed that we must do 
everything to get him to go along, for they knew him by reputation 
and it was at once clear to all of us that by his going the scope 
of the expedition could be doubled; for whereas I was but an 
ethnologist, a student of men and their works, he could study the 
animal life also of the little-known and unknown districts we ex- 
pected to traverse. Besides, his being with me would double my 



6 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

own chances of success, for it is often difficult to get Eskimo to leave 
their own country for the exploration of, to them, unknown districts, 
and if there were two of us together we could at all times, if we 
desired, be independent of the assistance of the Eskimo, could do 
what we liked and go where we pleased ; whereas a man who is alone 
cannot safely make long journeys on an uninhabited Arctic 
coast. 

Our equipment was the simplest possible. It consisted merely 
of two cameras that used films of the same size ; a supply of films 
for these cameras ; a pair of rifles that were the best that money 
could buy, and a thousand rounds of ammunition for these rifles ; 
half a dozen ordinary rifles and shot guns for the use of the Eskimo, 
and ammunition for these ; two pairs of six-power field glasses, also 
the best that the market afforded ; writing materials, pens and pen- 
cils ; two silk tents ; a little tobacco for the use of our prospective 
Eskimo employees ; some aluminum cooking utensils, and very little 
else. The outfit we took down the Mackenzie River weighed less 
than a ton, and yet with one exception — to be later noted — it 
contained all the essentials for Arctic exploration of the sort that we 
had planned. We considered that carrying food to the Arctic was 
carrying coal to Newcastle. 

The first laps of the journey were very simple. I left New 
York April 22d, 1908, and joined in Toronto Dr. Anderson, who 
had preceded me there by a few days, for we had arranged with 
Mr. R. F. Stupart, Director of the Dominion Meteorological Service, 
to establish for him six Meteorological stations along the Mackenzie 
River between Edmonton and the Arctic coast, and Dr. Anderson 
had gone to Toronto to take charge of the instruments and equip- 
ment for these stations. From here we went to Winnipeg and thence 
to Edmonton, over the new line of the Canadian Northern Railway, 
which had just opened up vast tracts of fertile farm lands lying 
well to the north of the older Canadian Pacific road. 

In Edmonton, as everywhere else along the line of our travel, 
people took the kindliest interest in our plans, and did everything to 
help us on our way. The private individuals who did us services 
are too many to mention, but of greater value to us than any one 
thing was the good will of the Hudson's Bay Company, extended 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 7 

through its commissioner, Mr. C. C. Chipman of Winnipeg. There 
was a time when the Hudson's Bay Company owned Canada, and 
still more recently they were in such absolute control of vast dis- 
tricts that their friendly support was an essential to any one who 
traveled in the country. To-day along the Mackenzie system their 
competitors in the fur trade have planted their stations every few 
hundred miles, yet even now the great Company is a power whose 
sphere stretches to the Polar Sea. 

We had at first intended to transfer our equipment to the Arctic 
in a York boat belonging to the Church of England. I had made 
arrangements for doing this with my friend and former fellow- 
traveler. Bishop Reeve, previously of the Mackenzie diocese but 
now stationed in Toronto. But it turned out on our arrival in 
Edmonton that this boat had not yet been built; nor was there 
immediate prospect of its being built. We therefore accepted the 
kind offer of Mr. Christie, Chief Clerk of the Mackenzie district, to 
become his guests on the first boats of the Company to go down 
the Athabasca River that spring. Civilization is continually making 
further inroads into the wilderness of the North. Since that time a 
railroad has been built from Edmonton ninety miles north to 
Athabasca Landing, but when we went north this was a two-days 
journey by stage. At Athabasca Landing was the most northerly 
post office and telegraph office, and from it we sent out our last 
messages and bade good-by to civilization — in the form in which 
that word is understood by the majority of men. Of course the 
two thousand miles of the Mackenzie Valley to the north of us were 
occupied at intervals by white men. These were the trappers and 
traders who from the point of view of the city dweller and the 
farmer are living in the wilderness, although I must confess that 
from the point of view of the Arctic explorer they seem to be dwell- 
ing in the heart of civilization. 

The three scows over which Mr. Christie had immediate com- 
mand left Athabasca Landing at two in the afternoon of May 7th. 
The Athabasca had been ice-free for but a few days, and huge blocks 
of ice were even now piled along its banks in windrows. The mos- 
quitoes, the plague of the northern forest, were not yet out in any 
numbers, and the down-river journey was a pleasant one. Generally 



8 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

we floated with the current, but occasionally our Indian crews would 
take the oars and row awhile. 

As this is to be a story of Arctic exploration we shall give but 
little space to the northward journey, although it is picturesque 
in itself and although it leads one through land strange to the ordi- 
nary traveler. The trading posts of the Hudson's Bay Company 
were located along the river's northward course, at distances averag- 
ing about two hundred miles apart. The first one hundred and 
sixty-five miles of the Athabasca River, from the Landing to the 
" Grand Rapids, " form a stretch of shoal water nevertheless naviga- 
ble by flat-bottomed steamers of light draft, and although we now 
traveled in the typical eight-ton spruce-wood freight scows of the 
Hudson's Bay Company, I had two years before traveled the same 
section of the journey aboard the steamer Midnight Sun. Although 
the Midnight Sun carried no freight but instead pushed several loaded 
freight scows in front of her, her fourteen inches or so of draft were 
too many for the depth of the river and we had kept running aground, 
bumping into rocks and having various accidents. At one time we 
stove a hole in the steamer's bottom and sank, but as the sinking 
only meant the settling of a few inches, it was a serious matter 
only from the point of view of delay. I have forgotten just how we 
went about the repairs. I am not sure but they may have raised her 
with jackscrews — at least that is a method which would seem prac- 
tical enough in most cases of shipwreck on the Athabasca. 

We made the one hundred and sixty-five miles in 1906 at an 
average speed of thirteen miles per day, which is very likely a low 
record for downstream steamboat navigation. On our present jour- 
ney we got along much faster and reached " Grand Rapids Island" on 
May 12th. The river here has a considerable fall ; the rapid on the 
west side of the island is impassable for any craft, while on the east 
side it may be run with comparative safety with unloaded or lightly 
loaded boats. This is risky business, however, in freighting, and the 
Hudson's Bay Company have built a tramway the full half mile 
of the island's length, and over this all the freight and some of the 
boats are usually transported while a few of the empty boats are run 
down the eastern channel. 

From Grand Rapids for a hundred miles to Fort MacMurray the 




York Boat goinu over Cascade Rapid, Athabasca. 




Scow RUNNING BoiLER RaPID, ATHABASCA. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 9 

stream is here and there interrupted by rapids, none of them serious 
for good canoe men, although the big freight scows when heavily 
loaded occasionally come to grief. The freight carried in the boats 
is always insured and accidents therefore do not mean any great loss 
of money, but it is a very inconvenient thing for that particular Hud- 
son's Bay post to which the stores of the sunken boat had been con- 
signed. It happens occasionally that a boat carrying most or all of 
the consignment to a certain post is wrecked and that the post is 
then compelled to go a year without such articles as tea, tobacco, 
prints, ribbons, chewing gum, and other things which the Indians 
nowadays consider the necessaries of life. It would seem that the 
Company might distribute the loss so as to make it fall less heavily 
on any particular post, but for some reason they do not generally 
do this. 

Each freight scow has a crew consisting of three or four rowers, 
a bowsman, and a steersman. The bowsman knows the rapids fairly 
well and is a good judge of water ; he stands in the front end of the 
boat with a pole raised above his head, which he manipulates so as to 
indicate to the steersman the direction that the boat should take. 
The steersman, however, is the most important member of the crew. 
He is the man of the greatest experience, resourceful, and has a 
reputation for knowing these particular rapids. When the boat 
approaches a rapid the steersman gives the word and all the oarsmen 
row as hard as possible so as to keep steerage way on the craft. 
With the speed of the water at anything from six to nine or ten miles 
an hour, and with an additional weight on the boat of perhaps a mile 
and a half or two miles due to the rowing, one's progress through 
the rapids is somewhat spectacular, although the real danger does 
not seem to be great ; for although boats are wrecked and cargoes 
sunk, I never heard of a single man losing his life. Still, the thing 
is considered dangerous locally, and a steersman who has an accident 
usually loses his nerve so completely that he never conducts a 
boat through the rapids again. Yet this is not a universal rule, 
for some steersmen whom I know have had several accidents. 

Some of the rapids are dangerous only in periods of low water. 
These low periods are irregular and cannot be predicted, for they de- 
pend apparently chiefly on the rainfall and the melting of the snow in 



10 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the mountains of British Columbia. Such a rapid as the Cascade 
may even disappear in really high water ; in stages of phenomenally 
low water it becomes impassable for boats, for it is but a plunge of 
water over a sharp ledge with a knifelike edge that may catch the 
boat's bottom and balance the boat so that it can go neither down 
nor back. 

Coming down the river we continually had before our eyes ex- 
amples of how a new country, careless of its rich natural resources, 
allows them to go to waste. The value of the spruce forests of 
Canada is apparent to those who theorize about it, but here day 
after day we traveled through a haze of forest fires, some of them 
burning at unknown distances from the river, others coming down 
to its very banks, with the flames licking the water. 

Sometimes these fires start no one knows how ; sometimes people 
know and do not tell and sometimes they are started intentionally 
by Indians, who consider that the hunting is made better by clear- 
ing the land so that they can see the game from greater distances. 
To do this is as shortsighted a policy for the Indian as it is for the 
government to allow its being done. True, there are forest rangers, 
but these I suppose exist to fulfill the letter of some law and to draw a 
salary. There is one who plies over two hundred and fifty miles 
from Athabasca Landing to Fort MacMurray, and another a some- 
what shorter distance from Fort MacMurray to Smith Landing. 
But even he who has the shorter beat makes but three trips a year 
and these are perfunctory. One of these rangers was a fellow passen- 
ger with us and did exactly as we did, — sat in his boat and lazily 
watched the flames as we drifted down the river. No doubt he re- 
ported the occurrence and presumably it was somewhere tabulated, 
to become a part of a useful body of statistics. 

On my previous trip down the river, in 1906, there was in our 
company Mr. Elihu Stewart, Forestry Commissioner for the Domin- 
ion of Canada, and as he has made a report on the forest resources 
of the Mackenzie Valley, there is far less reason than otherwise for 
my dwelling on the extent of its natural wealth — vast even yet in 
spite of the periodic fires. It will give some idea to say that there were 
in 1908 two sawmills near the south shore of Great Slave Lake that 
made lumber suitable for the building of steamboats, and that trees 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 11 

twelve inches in diameter, six feet above the ground, grow tall and 
graceful in the Mackenzie delta less than a hundred miles south of 
the tidewater of the Polar Sea. 

The thing that impresses a stranger in the country, and one to 
which a person of any feeling or imagination does not soon grow 
callous, is the cruelty and thoughtlessness with which dogs are 
treated in the north. It is a common thing that they are not fed all 
summer, and some therefore die of staivation, while most of them 
survive only as living skeletons until the approach of fall makes it 
necessary to feed them up in order that they may have some 
strength for the coming winter. And it is not merely that they are 
never fed — to show kindness to a dog is an unheard-of thing. If he 
merely passes your tent door, walking along and minding his busi- 
ness, it is good form for you to seize a hatchet or a hammer or any- 
thing that is near and throw it out to see if you can hit him. If 
you happen to knock an eye out or break a leg, it is considered an 
excellent joke, unless the dog's particular owner should be near, in 
which case he is offended ; not because he feels for the dog, but 
merely because he thinks that showing offense may give him some 
chance of recovering damages. Some of the white men treat the 
dogs a little better than the average Indian or half-breed, but a dog 
used to kindness is nevertheless a thing that I do not remember 
seeing. The result is that the poor dogs, who always expect a kick, 
will always receive your approach with a snarl. By buying some of 
these dogs and using them myself, I have found that even after this 
sort of bringing up they quickly become under kind treatment as 
friendly as our house dogs at home. 

Most of the men who composed our crews owned dogs, and when 
we left Athabasca Landing these to the number of twenty or so 
followed us along the banks of the river. The river frequently 
curves, and the boat channel generally lies now along one bank of 
the stream and now along the other. The poor dogs seemed to think 
each time our boat swung to one side of the river that we were 
about to land there, and those on the far side would accordingly take 
the water and swim over to us and land ; but soon the boat channel 
would take us across the stream again, and again the dogs would 
take the water. The poor animals were weak from hunger, but 



12 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

had they known how to husband their strength they could probably 
have followed us a good many days ; as it was, one by one they 
began to drop out and be left behind, many of them, no doubt, 
eventually to die of starvation. A thing that made the road of the 
dogs all the more difficult was that as we proceeded downstream 
the quantities of drift-ice stranded along the river's edge became 
greater and greater; the broken blocks were piled in windrows 
from twelve to twenty feet high, and to climb over these quickly 
tired the dogs out. 

Our first accident occurred on Sunday, the 10th of May. We 
had passed Pelican Portage at noon and at three o'clock we were 
running a small rapid. Our boat and the second one went through 
safely, but the last, occupied by Mr. Christie and Mr. Bremner, 
was stove on a rock and was a third full of water before they 
succeeded in running it aground. We put our scows immediately 
ashore and went to the rescue, but before we were able to empty 
the boat it had sunk in shallow water, and some sugar, tea, and other 
goods got spoiled. Still, the accident was not a very serious one, 
and by 6.30 in the evening we were -on the road again. Our Indian 
steersman commented upon the fact that this was a Sunday accident, 
and pointed out that his long experience on the river showed him 
that accidents often occur to boats that run on Sundays. 

The following day we came to the Grand Rapids of the Atha- 
basca, but stopped for a little while two or three miles south of the 
rapids at a place where two years before I had helped to bury an 
unknown Englishman, — unknown to all of us except that we knew 
his name was Herbert Bray. He had been cook on the Midnight 
Sun, had been taken sick a few days before we reached the rapids, 
and had been abused and maligned by everybody because he was 
supposed to be playing sick on account of being too lazy to do his 
own work. Nobody thought that there was anything serious the 
matter with him until one evening he died quietly. The next day 
we dug him a grave above high-water mark among the thick spruce 
trees. Mr. Stewart, the Forestry Commissioner, carved his name on 
a blazed tree, and I climbed the tree to make him the memorial of 
the North — the lop-stick. This consists in taking a tall and pref- 
erably isolated spruce tree and lopping off its branches for a dis- 




Fleet of Scows and "Model Boats" going down Athabasca, 1906. 








•Vi 



M 



•~- -.t^i^^^-z^m'M-^ 






Funeral of Herbert Bray, May, 1906. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 13 

tance of a few feet about three quarters of the way up the trunk. 
Usually the North forgets slowly. When a lop-stick is made to 
commemorate the killing of a fat moose or the giving of a great 
feast, the story is long remembered, but such a thing as the death 
of a stranger in a far country is apparently less impressive. Herbert 
Bray's grave was now in two years so nearly forgotten that I had 
to refer to Mr. Stewart's carving to prove that my opinion was 
more correct than two or three divergent ones as to where the grave 
actually was. 

May 9th was the first really hot day of the year. Along our 
route so far we had seen the willow catkins and some buds but no 
green leaves, but on the 10th a green tinge began to spread over 
all the woods, showing especially on the poplar bluffs. The nights 
were cool ; there was a slight frost between the 9th and 10th, but 
by the 11th the deciduous woods vfere fairly uniformly green. 



CHAPTER II 

MAY 12th we arrived at the Grand Rapids of the Athabasca 
River, one hundred and sixty-five miles north of Athabasca 
Landing. By the use of push carts on the tramway which 
the Hudson's Bay Company has built along the center of the island, 
it took two days to get our freight down to the eddy below the 
rapids. The empty boats were some of them run down the east 
channel and others let down by bow and stern lines. Our three 
boats were not the only ones here, for traders, prospectors, and adven- 
turers are always on their way north into a country that each year 
attracts greater and greater numbers of such folk. One party of 
three men reminded us of a tragic story we had heard on the river 
two years before. I think it was in 1902 that two brothers by the 
name of MacLeod, the sons of an old Hudson's Bay factor in the 
Mackenzie Valley, came from the Pacific coast east across the Rockies 
to the head of the Liard River and descended it safely to the Mac- 
kenzie at Fort Simpson. Two years later one of these same brothers, 
accompanied by two other white men, went up the Liard again with 
the notion of retracing his former route to the Pacific, and none of 
the three had been heard of since. For a year or two no particular 
alarm was felt, for communications are slow in that country, but by 
now it was four years since they had disappeared into the mountains, 
and most people had given up hope of their ever being heard from 
again. There were various speculations : there might have been 
accidents; they might have been murdered by the "bad Indians" 
whom many of the Mackenzie traders fear, and who are said to be 
located about the headwaters of the Liard. There were even rumors, 
which could have had no solid foundation, to the effect that the party 
had found a rich gold mine and that one of them had killed the other 
two so as to make himself sole possessor of the secret and that he was 
now lying low until he could safely develop the supposed gold mine. 
Two of the MacLeod brothers, one of them the same that had come 

14 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 15 

from British Columbia six years before, and one other man, had now 
set out with the intention of tracing the lost travelers as carefully 
as possible, with the hope of finding out at least where and how they 
had died. 

May 14th we left the Grand Rapids. The river was still falling 
and the rapids that lay between us and Fort MacMurray were there- 
fore getting more dangerous every day. We had no serious mis- 
haps, however, although now and again we struck a rock and sprung 
a slight leak. Our boats were built of spruce lumber, a material 
which has its disadvantages, but which seems to make the toughest 
and most flexible boats possible under the circumstances. At the 
Cascade Rapid we found the water so low that most of the boats 
preferred not to risk running over, and the freight was therefore 
portaged a dozen or fifteen yards and the boats lowered over the 
rapid by a rope. 

As we approached Fort MacMurray a strong, all-pervading odor 
began to be noticeable — the smell of tar which here and there 
trickled down the cut-banks of the river and which soiled our clothes 
when we went ashore. We had for some time been running through 
a belt of land supposed by many to be rich in oil, and one hundred and 
twenty miles north of the Athabasca Landing at the Pelican Rapids 
we had passed a burning gas well. Some years before, the govern- 
ment in prospecting for oil had struck a flow of natural gas. This 
stopped the boring operations and some one lit the torch which is 
still burning. It is a stimulating and in a way romantic thing, 
when a boatman drifts at night into the circle of its flickering light. 
It is the torch of Science lighting the way of civilization and economic 
development to the realms of the unknown North. Both the gov- 
ernment and individuals have followed up the promise of the tar-sands 
and considerable boring has been done, some of it showing a good 
prospect of oil production when sufficient capital shall be enlisted 
and suitable laws passed to enable investors to recover, if successful, 
the large sums that must be spent in prospecting. 

A short distance above Fort MacMurray the boats came rushing 
out of the last rapid into quiet and deep water that extends from 
there on north to Athabasca Lake. The steamer Grahame would at 
a later season of the year have met us at this point and carried us 



16 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

north, but she was just now occupied on Peace River, and we therefore 
proceeded in our scows. All along the river we saw numerous traces 
of game, especially the tracks of moose and of black bears. Now 
and then we would see a frightened bear running up the hillside from 
the river and occasionally a small cub would climb a tall spruce tree 
and be silhouetted against the skyline — a black knob near the top 
of the tree. It is probable that had it not been for the few straggling 
dogs which still followed us along the bank we should have seen 
several moose, but as it was there was scarcely a chance of it. 

The 21st of May was the first day of our journey that the mos- 
quitoes were out in great numbers. From now we had continuous 
swarms of them every day, until more than two months later when 
we reached the Arctic Ocean. There are just as many mosquitoes in 
the Arctic as anywhere on the Mackenzie, but the difference is 
that the Athabasca River season for them runs from May to Septem- 
ber, while on the Arctic coast it is only from about the 20th of June 
till the 10th of August. 

When we reached Athabasca Lake, May 22d, we found that the 
main body of the ice had been cleared out of the west end of the lake 
by a westerly wind a few days before, but still we had to shove our 
way through considerable belts of mush-ice now and then, while we 
were crossing from the mouth of the Athabasca to Fort Chipewyan, 
near the northwest corner of the lake. We stopped for a few days 
at the Fort, and while we were there a change of wind brought the 
ice back again from the east and drifted much of it into the head of 
Slave River. 

It is a curious thing that the Peace River, which, by the way, is 
a stream about the size of the Missouri and three times the size of 
the Danube, has two mouths, one into Athabasca Lake and one 
into Slave River. At seasons when the Peace is low this gives 
Athabasca Lake two outlets, for its water flows not only into the 
head of the Slave but also upstream, as it were, into the Peace. 
When again the Peace is high the process is reversed, and a consider- 
able volume of its water flows into Athabasca Lake. 

The Athabasca River, through which we had been traveling, 
is a stream comparable in size to the Ohio or the Danube, and 
flows most of its way through a valley of considerable proportions 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 17 

both as to width and depth ; but the Slave, from Athabasca Lake to 
Smith Rapids, flows through nearly level country, so far as one can 
see from the river. On the Athabasca there are outcrops of lime- 
stone and sandstone, but on the north shore of Athabasca Lake and 
about the head of Slave River the formation changes and granitic 
rocks become conspicuous. The current is sluggish and the river 
shows magnificent straight reaches, miles in length and the greater 
part of a mile in width, shining like mirrors in the sunshine, which at 
this season of the year is continuous and brings terrific heat. At 
noonday on our boats thermometers placed in the shade occasionally 
went above the hundred mark. We suffered considerably from the 
heat, but this is not peculiar to the Slave River. Even north of the 
Arctic Circle, whenever you get a hundred miles from the sea-coast 
you have temperatures running into the nineties in the sun. 

We arrived at Smith Landing June 5th, and had to delay there for 
several days while our freight was being transferred to Fort Smith, 
sixteen miles downstream below the Smith Rapids. This is a series 
of rapids, each of which has its name. Some of them can be run 
when special precautions are taken, but others require portages 
from a few yards up to several hundred yards. 

We got to Fort Smith in time to see an event of great interest — 
the launching of the steamer Mackenzie River. This is not the first 
steamer by any means that has plied on the lower Mackenzie. Her 
immediate predecessor was the screw-propelled Wrigley, and there had 
been others even before her. Most of the boats have been built north 
of the Smith Rapids, but one of them, Hislop and Nagle's Eva, was 
built on the upper river and taken down through the rapids and por- 
tages — a task which apparently no one believed possible of accom- 
plishment except Mr. Nagle himself, at the time that he undertook 
it. There probably never has been a more dramatic surprise in the 
history of the Mackenzie River than when the Eva floated into 
the view of the Hudson's Bay officers at Fort Smith, out of the gorge 
below the last rapid. 

On my first journey to the Arctic we went thirteen hundred miles 
down the Slave, across Slave Lake, and down the Mackenzie aboard 
the Wrigley. That the Mackenzie is a good river is well shown by a 
comparison of it with the Yukon. The Yukon has long ago demon- 



18 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

strated its tremendous importance in the economic development of 
Alaska, yet in spite of the most expert piloting and the most careful 
buoying of its channel I have been stranded on the Yukon flats for 
two days in a steamer drawing only four feet of water, and progress 
up the river was finally possible only by unloading and abandoning 
on the riverbank practically all the freight we had on board. The 
contrast with the Mackenzie is striking, for the Wrigley drew six and 
one half feet against the Yukon boat's four, was screw-propelled 
instead of being a stern-wheeler, ran over an unbuoyed course all the 
way, and had for a pilot a man who did not know the river particu- 
larly well but was merely a "good judge of water," and yet we had 
no serious trouble. Of course we ran aground now and then, but that 
was merely because we got out of the channel. In anticipation of 
these frequent groundings we carried all the lead and shot consigned 
to the North packed in 200-pound sacks in the bow of the Wrigley 
so as to make her down by the bow ; then whenever she ran her nose 
into a sand bar, the passengers and crew would turn to and carry all 
the lead back to the stern, and we floated free again. 

The Mackenzie River had been built under the supervision of a 
veteran of the northern rivers and lakes. Captain J. W. Mills, from 
lumber sawed in the Company's own sawmill near by. The old 
Wrigley had had but scant accommodations for six passengers ; the 
Mackenzie River provides for thirty-six. Of course she is not a large 
boat, but still she is a decade in advance of all other craft on the 
Mackenzie and would be a creditable boat even on the Yukon. 

The ice breaks out of the western end of Athabasca Lake usually 
about the middle of May and out of its east end a week or two later, 
for the seasons seem a good deal colder as you go east. In 1907 
Slave River opened May 24th, at Smith Landing, which was considered 
a late spring, while in 1908 the ice broke off May 12th. There are 
usually tremendous ice jams in the rapids between Smith Landing and 
Fort Smith, and these retard the open water of the upper river so that 
it takes it several days to make the sixteen miles. The break-up 
is therefore about a week later at Fort Smith. 

Here, as in many other places on the river, we saw examples of 
the improvidence of the Indians. Even in winter they dress in im- 
ported cloth garments which are far more expensive and not half 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 19 

so warm as the clothing they could make out of the skins of the ani- 
mals they kill. But similar things occur the world over. Perhaps 
it should not be regarded as strange, but rather as a proof of the 
universal brotherhood of man, that the Northern Indian would rather 
shiver in fashionable attire than be comfortable in the furs which are 
cheap and therefore unaristocratic. On Bear Lake I have known 
them to sell caribou skins at fifty cents apiece to buy a duck coat at 
eight or ten dollars, when two caribou skins would have made a 
much warmer garment. An Indian woman at Smith Landing, while 
we were there, traded twenty suckers, which was food enough for a 
week, for one pound of tinned salmon, which did not make even a 
meal for her, and this at a time when she had been on short rations 
for several days on account of the want of fish, and when the twenty 
fish were all she had caught. Chocolate, imported English jams and 
marmalade, candies, and ribbons are the staple wares of these posts 
nowadays. It must be said that it was a part of the generally wise 
policy of the Hudson's Bay Company not to encourage among the 
Indians the development of these expensive tastes which it is so 
difficult for them to find the means to satisfy, but of late years the 
Company has had to follow where other traders have led them and 
now, instead of taking into the country what they consider good for 
the Indian, they are forced to take in anything that the Indian will 
buy. It is only the wise laws of the land that have determined that 
these articles shall be candies and sweetmeats instead of brandies 
and gin. 

Here, to the west of Smith Landing, in the woods, is the only 
herd of wild buffalo now in existence in the world. These are the 
so-called "wood buffalo," of which there are several hundred. It is 
an easy walk from the river to the district they frequent, and any one 
can see them who has two or three days to spare and the money to 
hire an Indian guide. At present there is some effort being made to 
protect them from the extermination that has been the fate of the 
buffalo elsewhere. In connection with this general policy of the 
government. Major W. H. Routledge had been detailed to "look into 
the buffalo question," and we found him now at Smith Landing on 
his way out. During the winter he had made the trip westward across 
the Salt River and had photographed one of the bands. He gave it 



20 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

as his guess that there were at least three hundred of the animals and 
probably more. There were many stories of the Indians having gone 
out and shot buffalo since the protective laws were passed, but these 
it was rather difficult to sift to the bottom, for some declared stoutly 
that it had been done within a year, and others declared with as 
great conviction that the thing had not been done at all. 

After staying for a few days at Smith Landing, where Dr. Ander- 
son and" I were the guests of the factor, Mr. Maxfield Hamilton, we 
drove in a horse stage sixteen miles to Fort Smith. The road is 
through a forest and little has been done to improve it, but still it is 
very passable, for it leads chiefly through sandy land. Dr. Ander- 
son, who continually interested himself in such things, collected here 
a number of specimens of rare birds, and investigated the most 
northerly known pelican rookery on one of the islands of the Smith 
Rapids. The young of these were already hatched on June 9th. 

Up to this time we had been traveling with the transports of the 
Hudson's Bay Company. None of them were going forward beyond 
Fort Smith for some time to come. Dr. Anderson and I would have 
been compelled to proceed north alone had it not happened that some 
friends of ours were at Fort Smith, bound on a voyage to Bear Lake. 
They were the Englishmen CD. Melvill and John Hornby, and with 
them was perhaps the best known of all the Hudson's Bay men of the 
North, Mr. James Mackinlay, who had been factor at several posts, 
and whose name is well known in the literature of the North through 
his connection with the journeys of David Hanbury, Warburton 
Pike, Edward A. Preble, Gordon Gumming, and A. H. Harrison. 
They had a York boat and a scow, neither heavily loaded, and were 
therefore easily able to take aboard our small outfit and us. They 
accordingly invited us to be their guests on the down-river journey 
as far as the mouth of Bear River. 

We started from Fort Smith June 11th and that afternoon 
stopped at the mouth of the Salt River to buy salt from the Indians, 
which they get nearly pure in a bed exposed a few miles upstream. 
They bring it down to the mouth of the Salt River, where they keep 
it for trading purposes, supplying the entire Mackenzie district with 
salt. 

The Indians everywhere along the river are dressed in general 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 21 

like white men. Many of them speak Enghsh, often with a broad 
Scotch accent, for most of the Hudson's Bay factors, through a whole 
hundred years or more of the continuous occupation of the Mackenzie 
valley, have been Scotchmen and Orkneymen. Although practically 
unknown to science, these Indians are thoroughly sophisticated and 
have to a large extent forgotten the manners and customs of their 
ancestors. They are all Christianized, with the exception of one 
small tribe who live in the mountains westward from Fort Providence. 

It is a remarkable thing, as we have it from the stories of James 
Mackinlay and Joseph Hodgson and others who know them well, 
that this one tribe keep with jealousy the customs, religion, and 
language of their ancestors. They come down to Fort Providence 
to trade every summer, but they have nothing to do with the Chris- 
tianized Indians, nor with the white men, except in so far as they are 
compelled to in the mere matter of trading. These Indians are 
said by the Hudson's Bay men to differ strikingly from the rest of the 
natives in being more enterprising, more honorable, and thoroughly 
self-respecting. Up to four years ago, at least, they had constantly 
refused to take presents from the Canadian government, a thing which 
all the other Indians do under the name of ''treaty money." An 
arrangement was made a few years ago by which all the Indians, 
with the one exception noted, as far north as Fort Providence, signed 
away their "tribal rights" in consideration of the payment to them 
every year by the Canadian government of five dollars in money, and 
small presents of tea, flour, and other articles of trade. 

This is an arrangement which for the present at any rate does not 
seem to be doing the Indians any good, for they lose much valuable 
time in coming from great distances to the trading posts to wait for 
the "treaty parties" of the Indian Department ; but the arrangement 
at least furnishes employment, no doubt both pleasant and profit- 
able, to a few white men who come each year bearing gifts and who 
make the annual round of the tribes. There is with them a doctor, 
usually, who takes a glance at whatever sick and maimed there may 
be in the Indian villages, and who no doubt picks up information of 
interest about the condition of the natives; but he could scarcely 
be supposed to do them much good, directly, by this one visit a year. 
It would be much more to the advantage of the Indian if the Cana- 



22 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

dian government would do as the Danish government does in Green- 
land, and instead of sending these expensive parties on perfunctory 
visits, should station a medical man every two hundred or three 
hundred miles so that his services could be available when needed. 

We proceeded without adventure to the mouth of the Slave River, 
where through the kindness of Mr. Nagle we were taken in tow by 
one of his steamers and helped across Slave Lake. This is a great 
body of water, larger in area than Lake Erie, and the crossing of it 
would have been a fairly serious matter in the sort of craft we had. 
Before entering upon the real crossing of the Lake, we coasted west 
along its south shore from the mouth of the Slave to the mouth of the 
Hay River, where there is located a flourishing mission of the Church 
of England. Here we purchased, from the Rev. Mr. Vale, a whale 
boat perhaps twenty years old, which ten or more years ago had been 
secured by Bishop Reeve from the whalers of Herschel Island and 
had been brought up the river to be used on Slave Lake. It turned 
out that no one on Slave Lake was used to the manipulation of such 
craft, and this boat, which on the ocean is accustomed to weather 
severe gales, was here considered unsafe and none cared to use it. 
The boat was so leaky that after Mr. Nagle took her in tow behind 
the Eva it took constant bailing to keep her from being swamped. 
Every one not connected with the mission cautioned me against this 
purchase, saying the boat was rotten with age, but my opinion dif- 
fered from theirs and it turned out that she gave us several years of 
good service in the Arctic. 

On my first visit to Hay River, in 1906, the mission was in charge 
of Rev. Mr. Marsh, an excellent man in many ways, and remarkable 
as one of the first missionaries in the North to realize the deadliness 
to the Indian of the white man's house. Few things are more com- 
mon in missionary conferences than to have those who have just 
returned from work in distant fields show with pride the photo- 
graphs of the native communities at the time of the coming of the 
missionaries, and again a few years later. Typically the first picture 
shows a group of tents or wigwams, while twenty years later the 
missionary is able to point with pride to how, year by year, the number 
of cabins increased until now the last tipi has gone and a village of 
huts has replaced them. They do these things and we listen and 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 23 

applaud, in spite of the fact that we ourselves have come to realize 
that the way to deal with tuberculosis, which is deadly among us 
but far more deadly among the primitive peoples, is to drive the 
affected out of the house and into tents in the open air; and 
while charitable organizations in New York are gathering money to 
send the invalids of the city into the open air, there are also in New 
York missionary organizations gathering money to be used in herding 
the open air people into houses. While the missionary shows on the 
one hand a series of pictures indicating the growth of his village of 
civilized looldng dwellings, it would be interesting to ask him if he 
happens to have also a series of photographs illustrating the growth 
of the graveyard during the same period. No dwelling could be 
more sanitary and more likely to forestall tuberculosis than the tipi 
of the Indians of the Mackenzie Valley. It is not only always filled 
with fresh air, but it never becomes filthy, because it is moved from 
place to place before it has time to become so ; but when a house is 
built it cannot be moved. The housekeeping methods which are 
satisfactory in a lodge that is destined to stand in one place only 
two or three weeks at a time, are entirely unsuited for the log cabin, 
which soon becomes filthy and remains so. Eventually the germs 
of tuberculosis get into the house and obtain lodging in it. The 
members of the same family catch the disease, one from the other, and 
when the family has been nearly or quite exterminated by the 
scourge, another family moves in, for the building of a house is hard 
work and it is a convenient thing to find one ready for your occupancy ; 
and so it is not only the family that built the house that suffers but 
there is also through the house a procession of other families moving 
from the wigwam to the graveyard. 

Mr. Marsh saw these conditions and attempted to remedy them, 
but the Indians had become used to the warmth of the house and 
refused to go back to their old tenting habits. One family in partic- 
ular had a daughter grown to womanhood who showed in the spring 
the symptoms of tuberculosis. In the fall when they wanted to 
move back from their summer camp into their filthy cabin, Mr. 
Marsh gave the father a lecture on the unsanitariness of the house 
and on the necessity of their living in a tent that winter if 
they wanted to save their daughter's life. But the arguments did 



24 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

not appeal to the Indian. He could not see the germs that the 
missionary talked about, and did not believe that the cabin had 
anything to do with it. He announced that he knew better than to 
freeze in a tent if he could be comfortable in a house and therefore 
he would stay in the house. But it happened that Mr. Marsh had 
been a heavyweight prize fighter before he became a missionary, and 
so he walked into the Indian's house one day and threw him and his 
family bodily outdoors and their gear after them, nailed up their 
doors and windows, and told them that he did not want to see them 
around the village until the next spring. There was some loud talk 
among the Indians and several threats of shooting and other vio- 
lence, but eventually the family moved out into the woods and stayed 
away all winter as directed. In the spring they came back with 
their daughter apparently cured, and when I saw her she looked as 
well as any woman there. Mr. Vale and Mr. Johnson have since 
taken up Mr. Marsh's work along lines he had set for them and 
apparently with good results. In some other places, however, tuber- 
culosis has made a nearly clean sweep of the population. This is 
noticeably true at Fort Wrigley, where we were told that only nineteen 
hunters are left in all the territory belonging to that post. 

The ice in Slave Lake usually breaks up the first part of July. 
The earliest crossing of it known took place some years ago on June 
23d. For two weeks or so before the lake can be actually crossed, 
the ice in it will be broken up and in motion. In 1908 the ice off 
Resolution began to move June 12th, and off Hay River on June 15th. 
Hay River itself usually breaks up about a month ahead of the Lake. 

From Slave Lake north to the Arctic Ocean there are no interrup- 
tions to navigation and our travel proceeded smoothly and without 
adventure. Here and there we passed Indian lodges on the shore and 
Indian cabins, and on an average every two hundred miles a Hudson's 
Bay post, where a mission is also located. 

The two churches that have workers in the field are the Roman 
Catholic and the Church of England, both of them doing considerable 
useful work. The Church of Rome has a much stronger hold upon 
the people, partly, no doubt, because of its earlier introduction into 
the country, and because also of its greater resources it is doing more 
work. After many years of observation of the labors of missionaries 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 25 

I am inclined to the view that with the other churches the excellence 
of the results depends primarily upon the individual at any particular 
place, but that the Church of Rome has a system which produces 
results to some degree independent of the personality of the man. 
One weakness of other missionaries in general is that they come from 
cities and other places with crystallized notions of exactly what must 
be done and exactly how every one must live and act under no matter 
what conditions. The fundamental precepts of Christianity ap- 
parently seem to many of them to be linked with certain purely 
local customs of the city from which they happen to come, and they 
emphasize both equally. The three commandments, "Love thy 
neighbor as thyself," " Thou shalt keep the Sabbath holy, " and " Thou 
shalt eat thy potatoes with thy fork," impress themselves with equal 
vividness upon the aborigines and are likely to be considered by them 
to be means of grace of coordinate value. But the missionaries of the 
Church of Rome seem less concerned about these inessentials. They 
are no less concerned than the missionaries of other churches about 
getting the Indian to change his religious views, but they seem less 
inclined to waste their strength in trying to persuade him to change 
the color of his coat. The net result of this difference is shown to 
be entirely in favor of the Roman Church. These natives have, 
through the evolution of centuries, been ground into such perfect 
adjustment to their environment that the more you disturb this 
adjustment the more disastrous the result will be to the physical wel- 
fare of the native. 

Both the English Church and the Roman have schools in the Mac- 
kenzie district — the English at Hay River and the Roman at 
Fort Providence. At both places are men and women doing con- 
scientious and self-sacrificing work, and at both places numbers of 
Indians are learning to read and write, but nevertheless it seems to 
most observers that the labor and expenditure of money are scarcely 
justified by the results. You have everywhere the Indians of the old 
type, who are ignorant of book learning but who still retain some of 
the integrity and self-respect of their ancestors. These men on the 
whole seem to be more self-confident and self-reliant than the educated 
ones, and are more likely to be making not only a living but also an 
honest living. Somehow it seems that one of the first things an In- 



26 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

dian learns in school is contempt for the ways of his ancestors; 
but after all, the ways of his ancestors are the only ways that can 
prevail in that country. Hunting and fishing are the necessary occu- 
pations of every man, and the sewing of clothes and the preparation 
of food are equally the inevitable work of the women. When a man 
who has no occupation other than that of hunter open to him gets 
to feel that he is above that occupation, the community has lost 
much and no one has gained anything. 

There are many people in the Mackenzie district who have given 
me much valuable information about their country, the greater part 
of which, however, has to be omitted here, but few men perhaps 
know the country better than Father Giroux, formerly stationed at 
Arctic Red River but now in charge of Providence. He says it is 
true in the Mackenzie district, as it is among the Arctic Eskimo, that 
measles is the deadliest of all diseases. There have been several 
epidemics, so that it might be supposed that the most susceptible 
had been weeded out, and yet the last epidemic (1903) killed about 
one fifth of the entire population of the Mackenzie Valley. He 
had noticed also a distinct and universal difference in health between 
those who wear white men's clothing and who live in white men's 
houses, as opposed to those who keep the ancient customs in the 
matter of dress and dwellings. These same elements I have since 
found equally harmful among the Eskimo, although among them 
must be added the surely no less dangerous element, the white 
men's diet, which is no more suited to the people than white 
men's clothing or houses. 

Grains and vegetables of most kinds, and even strawberries, are 
successfully cultivated at Providence. North of that, the possible 
agricultural products get fewer and fewer, until finally the northern 
limit of successful potato growing is reached near Fort Good Hope, 
on the Arctic Circle. Potatoes are grown farther north, but they do 
not mature and are not of good quality. 

In certain things the Mackenzie district was more advanced the 
better part of a century ago than it is now ; the explorers of Franklin's 
parties, for instance, found milk cows at every Hudson's Bay post and 
were able to get milk and cream as far north as the Arctic Circle and 
even beyond. At that time, too, every post had large stores of dried 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 27 

meat and pemmican, so that if you had the good-will of the Company 
you could always stock up with provisions anywhere. Now this is 
all changed. Game has become so scarce that it would be difficult 
for the Company, even if they tried, to keep large stores of meat on 
hand. The importation of foodstuffs from the outside, on the other 
hand, has not grown easy as yet, and it is therefore much more difficult 
to buy provisions now than it was in Franklin's time. The trading 
posts are located now exactly where Franklin found them, so that tak- 
ing this into consideration, and the decrease of game all over the 
northern country, it is clear that exploration on such a plan as ours — 
that of living on the country — is more difficult now than it was a 
hundred years ago. Another element that makes the situation more 
risky is that while then you could count on finding Indians anywhere 
who could supply you with provisions, or at least give you information 
as to where game might be found, now there are so few of the Indians 
left alive, — and all of those left are so concentrated around the trading 
posts, — that you may go hundreds of miles without seeing a camp or 
a trail, where seventy-five or a hundred years ago you would have 
found the trails crossing each other and might have seen the camp 
smokes rising here and there. 

The food supplies of the different posts vary according to location. 
In general the trading stations are divided into "fish posts" and 
"meat posts." Fort Smith is a typical meat post, for caribou are 
found in the neighborhood and moose also; and the Indians not 
only get meat enough for themselves and for the white men, but 
the fur traders even find the abundance of the meat supply a handi- 
cap in their business, — for the Indian who has plenty to eat does not 
trap so energetically as do others who must pay in fur for some of 
their food. Resolution, Hay River, and Providence, on the other 
hand, are fish posts, while at any of the northern trading stations 
potatoes nowadays play a considerable part in the food supply, even 
as far up as Good Hope. In certain places and in certain years 
rabbits are an important article of diet, but even when there is an 
abundance of this animal, the Indians consider themselves starving 
if they get nothing else, — and fairly enough, as my own party can 
testify, for any one who is compelled in winter to live for a period of 
several weeks on lean meat will actually starve, in this sense : that there 



28 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

are lacking from his diet certain necessary elements, notably fat, and it 
makes no difference how much he eats, he will be hungry at the end of 
each meal, and eventually he will lose strength or become actually 
ill. The Eskimo who have provided themselves in summer with 
bags of seal oil can carry them into a rabbit country and can 
live on rabbits satisfactorily for months. The Indian, unfortunately 
for him, has no animal in his country so richly supplied with fat as 
is the seal, and nowadays he will make an effort to buy a small 
quantity of bacon to eat with his rabbits, unless he has a little 
caribou or moose fat stored up from the previous autumn. 

June 30th, we had our first sight of the Rocky Mountains, about 
four hours after leaving Fort Simpson. These are spurs of the 
Rockies which approach nearer and nearer to the river, until at Fort 
Wrigley the river skirts the foothills, while at Fort Norman, at the 
mouth of Bear Lake River, the mountains have even thrown a chain 
of high hills across the Mackenzie. The highest of these is Bear Rock, 
standing north of Bear River in the angle between it and the Mac- 
kenzie. 

We were told at Fort Wrigley that the Mackenzie River broke 
open May 22d, and had not been frozen solid until November 
18th of the fall before. These were considered average seasons. 
At Fort Good Hope, near the Arctic Circle, the Mackenzie may fre- 
quently be crossed on the ice as early as November 1st. The Mac- 
kenzie freezes a few days ahead of Bear Lake River, on account, no 
doubt, of the swiftness of the latter, and also because of the compara- 
tive warmth of the water where it comes out of Bear Lake. The very 
head of Bear River, where it emerges from the lake, never freezes 
over all winter. 

At Fort Norman game conditions have undergone great changes 
during the last fifty years. The mountain sheep (Ovis dalli) were 
then, as now, confined to the mountains west of the river, but the 
moose were also west of the river then, while since that time they 
have crossed the river and have gradually moved toward Bear Lake 
and encircled it until, in the summer of 1909, the first moose 
were seen by the Eskimo on Coronation Gulf near the mouth of the 
Coppermine River (a fact which, of course, was unknown to the 
Hudson's Bay traders and which we learned from the Eskimo in the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 29 

summer of 1910). The caribou fifty years ago were abundant around 
Fort Norman and used to pass on their seasonal migrations in vast 
herds between Fort Norman and Bear Lake ; but for the last decade 
or two practically no caribou have been seen west of the lake, and the 
hunters have to go to the eastern end of it to get any. The Indians 
meantime have become not only few through disease, but have also 
lost their enterprise because of the ease with which they can make 
their living by sponging on the missions and the traders, and by 
catching a little fish in the Mackenzie ; very few of them, therefore, 
ever go to the eastern end of the lake for caribou unless some white 
man goes there too. For years there had been no Indians around 
the mouth of the Dease River, but now that Melvill, Hornby, and 
Mackinlay were going in there, a number accompanied them. 

Another animal the migrations of which are of interest is the musk- 
rat. It has been spreading northeast at about the same rate as the 
moose. We found in 1910 that even the young men among the 
Eskimo of Coronation Gulf can remember the time when first they 
saw muskrats on the upper Dease, while to-day these animals are 
found much farther north than that, even going close down to the 
Arctic coast. The beaver, too, are said to be spreading northeast- 
ward, although they are not yet so near the ocean as to be seen by the 
Eskimo. 

We arrived at Fort Arctic Red River July 5th. This is the most 
northerly "fort" of the Hudson's Bay Company on the Mackenzie 
River proper. It is, perhaps, a little late in the day to explain 
what we should have explained in our first reference to the institu- 
tion known as a "fort" in the North. A Hudson's Bay "fort" is 
typically a small group of log cabins consisting of the factor's resi- 
dence, a store in which he trades with the Indians, and possibly 
a small house in which he keeps dried fish or other provisions. 
In the early days among the Indians to the south some of the 
Hudson's Bay trading posts used to have stockades about them, 
and were, therefore, more deserving of the title of fort ; in the Mac- 
kenzie River district there is nothing to suggest special suitability 
for defending the trading posts against attack. In fact, there has 
never been any danger of attack, for a simple reason which may be 
worth pointing out. 



30 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

In the fertile lands of the United States and Canada a saying grew 
up that "the only good Indian is a dead Indian," because the 
Indian encumbered the land which the farmer needed for cultivation 
of crops, and the miner for his digging and delving. The Indian was 
in the way and had to go, for we could not let questions of mere hu- 
manitarianism and justice restrain us from taking possession of the 
valuable lands that the Indian had inherited from his ancestors. 
In the South, economic and humanitarian interests were diametrically 
opposed, and the economic had their way. In the North, economic 
and humanitarian interests happened to coincide. The northern 
land was valueless to the farmer, and the country was of value to the 
trading companies only in so far as it produced fur ; and furs could best 
be secured by perpetuating the Indian and keeping him in possession 
of the lands, because dead men do not set traps. The only good 
Indian in the North was the live Indian who brought in fur to sell. 
No doubt it is largely the result of this economic fact that the Hud- 
son's Bay Company has always treated the Indian so well that it has 
never been to the Indian's interest to quarrel with the Company, any 
more than it was to the Company's interest to quarrel with the 
Indian. And now that civilization, with its diseases, is making in- 
roads into the country, and the Indian seems in danger of disappear- 
ing, it is not only human lives but also dollars and cents that the 
Company sees disappearing before its eyes. When they controlled 
all the North, they handled its problems a great deal more wisely than 
the Canadian government has done since, although the Canadians 
have been both wiser and cleaner-handed than the people of the 
United States. But the Company no longer own Canada, and they 
are powerless to check the evil tendencies which they recognize more 
clearly than any one else. 



CHAPTER III 

WE found on reaching the head of the Mackenzie delta 
that the river at this point had broken open May 22d, 
and so had the Arctic Red River. This was a rather late 
spring, for we have since known the Mackenzie two hundred miles 
farther north, where it enters the ocean, to open up before the 20th 
of May. 

From the Arctic Red River we descended to the head of the delta, 
termed Demarcation Point, and ascended the Peel River for eighteen 
miles to Fort Macpherson. Here I found many whom I knew well 
from my previous expedition — my old friend John Firth, who has 
been in charge of northerly trading posts for the Company for the 
better part of half a century, the four officers and men of the 
Royal Northwest Mounted Police, the Reverend and Mrs. C. E. 
Whittaker, and Miss Florence Hamilton, their assistant. The police 
detachment was under the command of Major A. M. Jarvis. It 
consisted of Sergeant Selig and two constables, the brothers Pearson. 
Although I had never met Major Jarvis before, it turned out that 
we had several mutual friends. 

Dr. Anderson had remained behind at Fort Norman for the pur- 
pose of carrying on his investigations at that zoologically interesting 
locality, and I expected him to arrive with the steamer Mackenzie 
River, which was due now in a few days. My idea in hurrying so 
much to reach the mouth of the Mackenzie had been to make sure 
that I would not miss certain of the Eskimo whom I had it in mind 
to try and hire for the coming year. Since leaving Fort Norman I had 
traveled in the whale-boat purchased at Hay River, which was towed 
behind Mr. Nagle's steamer. This was Mr. Nagle's first trip down 
the river and his steamer had never before gone farther than Arctic 
Red River, although the Hislop and Nagle Company had a trading 

31 



32 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

post at Fort Macpherson. His company had found that the fur trade 
for the last few years had not been paying them well and Mr. Nagle 
had therefore come down the river a week or two earlier than usual 
in order to close up his trading establishment at Fort Macpherson. 
This had been good fortune for me and had brought me to Macpher- 
son before the coming of the first Eskimo from the North. The 
Indians will always make a point of waiting at their trading post for 
the coming of the steamer, but the Eskimo occasionally come up to 
Fort Macpherson and leave again before the steamer arrives, for 
they are in a hurry to go back to the Arctic coast, both on account of 
their summer fishing and because they want to intercept the whaling 
ships at Herschel Island for trading purposes. 

During my stay at Fort Macpherson I was the guest of Major 
Jarvis. The rest of the policemen occupied the barracks on top of 
the high bluffs that here flank the eastern side of the Peel, but the 
Major preferred a tent by himself down by the riverside. Soon after 
our arrival, the Eskimo boats began to come from the North and the 
Major's tent became the center of a village of their tents. Most of 
the Eskimo were old friends among whom I had Kved on my pre- 
vious expedition. There was much talking and laughter, and ap- 
parently they were very glad to see me, but no more glad, I am sure, 
than I was to see them, for I had reason to consider some of them 
among my best friends in the world. Under their communistic 
system of living the Eskimo have developed the social virtues to a 
considerably higher degree than we have ; they are therefore people 
easy to live with, and one readily makes friends among them, but, 
of course, they differ individually as we do. Of all those who came 
here this summer the finest, in my estimation, was Ovayuak, a man 
who had been my host for several months during 1906-1907. The 
Hudson's Bay Company had recognized in him the same qualities 
which were apparent to me, and had accordingly made him a " Chief," 
which merely means that he is the Company's accredited representa- 
tive among his countrymen, and acts, in a sense, as the Company's 
agent. In talking with Ovayuak I found that many of my acquaint- 
ances of a few years before were dead, some of them of consumption, 
some of unknown diseases, and a group of eight had been poisoned by 
eating the meat of a freshly killed white whale. It happens every 




CoOivlXU WITH DiUFT-WOOD, jMAUK.i:.\ZlJi Dklta. 




Skinning a Bearded Seal. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 33 

now and then that a whole party of natives is killed by eating white 
whale meat. This sort of thing is referred to by the whalers ordi- 
narily as ptomaine poisoning ; but it can scarcely be that, as I have 
seen tons of semi-decayed whale meat eaten and have never known 
a single case of sickness or death connected therewith, while the 
poisonings always occur at feasts which are held immediately after the 
killing of a whale, or else from whale meat that has been cut up 
promptly after the killing and stored so as to largely or entirely 
prevent its decay. 

On the lower posts of the Mackenzie River and here at Mac- 
pherson we had gradually been picking up such dogs as were for sale, 
and now had eleven all together. So as to put in operation as early 
as possible our principle of living on the country, we began here to 
set our fish nets to get food for ourselves and the dogs, but there 
were so many other nets in the water that we got very little, and I 
had to buy a few hundred pounds of dried fish to eke out. 

July 14th the steamer Mackenzie River arrived, bringing, besides 
the officers and men of the Hudson's Bay Company, Dr. Anderson and 
two women travelers, Miss Agnes Deans Cameron and Miss Jessie 
Brown. Miss Cameron had come to get material for a book on the 
Mackenzie River and listened eagerly to all the stories she heard 
about the North. Most of these were picturesque, but judging from 
the ones which I personally heard related to Miss Cameron I should 
say that a considerable portion of them were scarcely gospel truth. 
I happened to be, besides the missionary Mr. Whittaker, the only 
person present who spoke any Eskimo at all, and I therefore volun- 
teered my services to Miss Cameron as her interpreter, but she de- 
clined them graciously, saying she preferred to get her impressions at 
first hand. She went into a considerable number of Eskimo tents 
for the purpose of securing information and local color. I have since 
heard what it was that the Eskimo thought she asked them, but I 
have not yet learned what it was that she thought they told her in 
reply. 

On my first trip down the Mackenzie River all of the affairs of 
the Company had been under the direction of Mr. Thomas Anderson, 
an energetic and capable officer of the old school. He was a man 
generous to a fault with his own property, as I have good reason to 



34 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

know through being with him in Winnipeg and Edmonton, but as 
soon as he got into the North where everything he handled belonged 
to the Company rather than to himself, he became parsimonious 
even to niggardliness ; and much of his talk concerned the degenerate 
later days when people insisted on living on such imported things as 
beans, canned corn, and tomatoes, whereas in his day they lived 
entirely on fish and caribou meat. Now everything was changed. 
Not only had the modern Mackenzie River replaced the old-fashioned 
Wrigley, but Thomas Anderson had died, and the affairs of the Com- 
pany were under the no less energetic but completely modern 
direction of Mr. Brabant. I remember how, in 1906, Mr. Anderson 
boiled with indignation at having to carry one of the servants of the 
Hislop & Nagle Trading Company as a passenger for sixty miles from 
Red River to Macpherson, and he spoke with suppressed fury of the 
degenerate officials at Winnipeg who compelled him to countenance 
such things ; and now we had in his stead Mr. Brabant, who would 
have been the better pleased the more of his rivals' men he could have 
carried, providing, of course, they paid him fares for transportation 
which yielded a profit to the Company. The change had been 
gradually taking place, but with the coming of Mr. Brabant the 
transformation was complete, from the old policy of exclusion of 
competitors to the modern one of unrestricted competition. 

Mr. Whittaker, who had no intention of discontinuing his labors 
at Macpherson, found that through some miscarriage the supplies 
intended for him had failed to make connection at Fort Smith with 
the Mackenzie River. He and his family, therefore, found themselves 
with nothing to live on for the winter at Macpherson, and had to 
take passage upstream to Hay River. This ill wind blew me con- 
siderable good, for I was able to rent a good whale-boat for the use 
of my party from Mr. Whittaker, and to buy from him three excellent 
young dogs, the faithful work of which through the coming four years 
was one of the factors in such success as we had on our sledge explora- 
tion. Three good dogs are worth thirteen poor ones, and a great 
deal more. 

July 16th Dr. Anderson and I in our two whale-boats set out from 
Macpherson for the Arctic coast, distant about two hundred miles 
as the river runs. We were accompanied by two Eskimo boys, 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 35 

whose services with us were temporary, and by Ilavinirk, whom I 
had known well upon my previous expedition and whom I now en- 
gaged, together with his family of wife, daughter of seven, and adopted 
son of about eighteen. The family were on the seacoast and Ilavin- 
irk alone joined us here, for he had come south in the service of a 
white man named Chris Stein, a retired whaleman who is now a 
trader and trapper in a small way in the Mackenzie delta. Mr. 
Stein was also an old friend whom I knew well during the winter of 
1906-1907, when he lived at Shingle Point on the Arctic coast. 

In traveling down the river we sailed when the wind was fair, 
and occasionally tried to tack against a head wind, but in this we 
were usually not successful, for when the wind blows against the 
river current there is soon produced a choppy sea, which is too 
much for a loaded whale-boat. In head winds and calms, therefore, 
we used to "track" the boat. This process consists in fastening a 
long line to the boat mast about five feet up, and attaching either 
men or a dog team to the other end of the line to tow the boat along 
the beach. 

We reached the open ocean July 23d, but were delayed here 
somewhat by strong winds, for, like the delta flats of any other 
river, the Mackenzie mouth is an exceedingly dangerous place in a 
high wind, when mountainous breakers roll in from the open sea. 
On the 24th we reached the first Eskimo camp on the coast, at a 
place called Niakonak, just after the sudden death of a woman and 
young girl from white whale poisoning. This is another of the cases 
I have since heard referred to by mounted policemen and whalers 
as ptomaine poisoning. But the Eskimo explain it by saying that 
the women died because they made some caribou skin into garments 
the day after they ate white whale. In other words, they had broken 
a taboo. Personally, I agree neither with the policemen nor the Es- 
kimo. It seems to me the poisoning could scarcely have been pto- 
maine, because the meal after which the women sickened took place 
within three or four hours after the animal was killed ; in fact, the 
pieces of meat were put right into the pot the moment they were 
cut from the animal. 

We reached the harbor behind the Shingle Point sandspit July 
24th. We were now less than sixty miles from Herschel Island, and 



36 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

found ourselves in company with something like twenty whale-boats, 
all of them as eager as we to get to Herschel Island, for we feared 
the whaling ships might come in from the west any day. The 
vessels when they come in usually run behind the Herschel Island 
sandspit for a few hours or a day, and then keep on with their 
whaling cruise to the northwest, returning to Herschel Island again 
only in September. It was therefore imperative for all of us to get 
there ahead of the vessels, for the Eskimo wanted to trade, and some 
wanted to go east along the coast, while we wanted to get certain sup- 
pHes that had been shipped to us through San Francisco. We were 
also in hopes of getting a ship to carry us as far at least as Cape 
Bathurst on our road to Coronation Gulf. It was our plan to spend 
the coming winter near Cape Parry, about one hundred miles east of 
the most easterly known settlement of Eskimo, from which point we 
wanted to start the following spring on our search to the eastward for 
Eskimo who had not seen a white man. These we hoped to find, if 
we found them at all, about two hundred miles east of Cape Parry. 
But though we were all in a hurry to get to Herschel Island, we had 
to remain at Shingle Point several days on account of strong head 
winds. Then one day when I awoke in the morning I could see 
by the way in which the wind bulged in the east side of my tent that 
the hoped-for fair wind had come at last. I lost no time in awakening 
my companions, but before we had breakfast prepared, a number of the 
other Eskimo came to see us and asked whether we intended start- 
ing for Herschel Island that day. My answer was that of course we 
did, at which they seemed very well pleased and returned to their 
respective camps, struck their tents and got everything ready for the 
start. When breakfast was over I said to my Eskimo that we 
would start now, but they replied that they could not be the first to 
start, but would be glad to start if some other boat led off. They 
explained to me then that they were no longer heathen, as they had 
been two years ago when I was among them ; that they now knew 
God's commandments and were aware of the penalties which awaited 
the Sabbath-breaker. I asked them what difference it would make 
who started first. The reply was that God punished those who 
took the lead in evil-doing, and if some one else was willing to 
take the lead and risk the punishment, they were perfectly willing 




Ruins of Amundsen's House at King Point, occupied 1905-06. 

The sea has since carried off every vestige. The ship is the whaler Bonanza of San 
Francisco, stranded in September, 1905. 






Gbave of 



WiiK AT King Point. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 37 

to take advantage of the fair wind and sail along behind. Dr. 
Anderson and I at once suggested that we could sail the first boat, 
and our Eskimo could come in the second ; but they said that a sub- 
terfuge of that sort would avail nothing, that they were members 
of my party, and the punishment would fall on the party as a whole. 
They suggested, however, that I go around to the tents of the other 
Eskimo and see if I could not induce some of them to start out so that 
we could follow. I accepted this suggestion, but in tent after tent 
I got everywhere the same answer : "We are no longer heathen ; we 
know the punishment that awaits the Sabbath-breaker. We were 
hoping that you would sail first, but as for us, none of us are willing 
to take the responsibility." And so we sat there all day through a 
fair wind, all of us eagerly willing to go, but all of us unwilling to 
lead off in any "evil-doing." Finally, towards sundown, a whale- 
boat was seen coming from the east. It turned out to be the boat of 
the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, under command of Sergeant 
Selig. We signaled to them. I told Sergeant Selig our predica- 
ment, and found, as I expected, that he was willing to help us out by 
stopping to eat a meal with us, and thus becoming one of our party, 
and then leading off in such a way that it became evident he took 
all responsibility upon himself and his boat. As soon as this fact 
was made known, there was great rejoicing in camp. Every tent 
was quickly struck, and all the boats loaded, and when Sergeant Selig 
set sail we all followed him. But it was now near evening, and the 
wind fell with the sun. We had sat through a fair wind that could 
easily have taken us to Herschel Island, and now instead we had to 
row a large part of the way and finally, toward morning, to tack 
against head winds. Monday morning we passed King Point, where 
Amundsen wintered 1905-1906, and photographed the ruins of his 
house which the sea has since completely swept away, and the grass- 
grown grave of Wiik, the magnetician whose painstaking work brought 
so much credit to Amundsen's expedition. We reached Herschel 
Island at noon on Wednesday, to find, however, that the whaling ships 
had not yet arrived. 

This was our first conflict with Christianity, and we had come off 
second best, as many others have done who have set themselves 
against the teachings of religion. The Eskimo had of course, when 



38 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

I was with them two years before, a rehgion, but it had not been 
Christianity. One frequently hears the remark that no people in 
the world have yet been found who are so low that they do not have a 
religion. This is absolutely true, but the inference one is likely 
to draw is misleading. It is not only true that no people are so 
low that they do not have a religion, but it is equally true that the 
lower you go in the scale of human culture the more religion you 
find, and that races on the intellectual level of the Eskimo have so 
much religion that a man scarcely turns his hand over without the 
act having a religious significance. Every event in life, every pos- 
sible circumstance, has its appropriate religious formula. 

When I was with the Eskimo in 1907, they had not yet been 
Christianized, although Mr. Whittaker and other missionaries of the 
Church of England had been working among them for the better part 
of fifteen years. It was then said by Eskimo and whites alike that 
there were perhaps half a dozen Alaskan Eskimo living in the 
Mackenzie district who had been converted, besides one Mackenzie 
Eskimo who was married to an Alaskan Christian woman. That was 
the condition when I left the Mackenzie in September, 1907. When 
we returned in July, 1908, w^e found every man, woman, and child 
converted. 

This seems a rather sudden thing, especially as the missionaries 
had had so little influence for the many years preceding. But 
it appears that the spread of Christianity among the Eskimo was 
as the spread of a habit or a fashion, much indeed as it was in certain 
of the northern European countries, the history of which is well 
known to us. In a general way it seems true that Christianity 
first got its foothold in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska, due largely, I have 
been told, to the work of the Moravian Mission. From there the 
fashion seems to have spread both northward along the coast to 
Point Hope and northeastward up the Kuvuk and Noatak rivers, 
thence across the Arctic Mountains and down the Colville to the 
coast. Christianity, then, came to the Eskimo of Point Barrow from 
two sides ; they heard of it from the Point Hope Eskimo to the west 
and from the Colville Eskimo to the east, and they, although mis- 
sionaries had been laboring among them for many years, seem to 
have been suddenly converted. Apparently they felt this way about 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 39 

it : if it is good enough for the Point Hope people and the Colville 
people, it ought to be good enough for us. And when in the winter 
of 1907-1908, the Mackenzie River Eskimo heard that all of 
the people to the westward had accepted the faith, they seem to 
have felt that it was about time for them to do so too, and they were 
converted in a body. 

When we reached Herschel Island, we did not go to the village in 
the northeast corner where the mounted police barracks are situated 
as well as the Eskimo village, both of which are there because of the 
sandspit that makes the whalemen's harbor. This is not only an 
excellent harbor in summer, but also a nearly ideal wintering place 
for the whaling vessels which are shielded by the sandspit from the 
pressure of the ocean ice. We pitched our camp on Flanders Point 
on the southeast corner of the island, for that is the best fishing place 
in the neighborhood, and we were here able to get not only fish 
enough for ourselves and our dogs, but also were able to lay by a 
considerable store for our expected boat journey. 

The first whaling ship reached Herschel Island in 1889, and for 
a few years thereafter the industry prospered greatly. It was im- 
mensely profitable, and at times as many as fourteen ships wintered 
in the Arctic at one time. This had a sudden effect on the fortunes 
of the Eskimo. Before that time they had been in the habit of 
making summer trading voyages up to Fort Macpherson to buy a 
few small things, but now, when this large whaling fleet came, all 
their conditions of life were changed. All of the articles which they 
had been used to buying, they could now get cheaply or for nothing 
from the whalers, and they soon learned the use of a great many other 
articles, the very names and appearances of which were unknown to 
them before — articles which even the Hudson's Bay factor at 
Macpherson had been compelled to do without. The ships brought, 
too, an abundance of provisions. At first the Eskimo would have 
nothing to do with any of these ; but in the course of a few years they 
learned the use of flour, molasses, sugar, etc., which became first 
luxuries and then necessities. It was important for the whaling ships 
to get plenty of fresh caribou meat to keep their crews from getting 
scurvy, and they employed practically the whole population in the 
pursuit of caribou, fish, and ptarmigan. Such things as flour, hard 



40 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

bread, sugar, canned meats and vegetables, butter, etc., they gave 
with a free hand to the Eskimo, urging them to use them and to save 
meat. The Eskimo of course preferred meat as an article of diet, 
and now they were further impressed with the fact that the white 
man seemed to consider meat of priceless value and the other food 
articles of little value or none. Meat, therefore, came to have a 
fabulous price compared with other commodities, and during the time 
of my experience in the North, a pound of meat has been worth more 
than a pound of any article of civilized diet except tea. 

It would be a matter of too great detail to enter here into the 
minute causes of the change in the Eskimo's habits of life, but the 
net result is that although the time from 1889 to 1906 is but a 
few years, still there has been greater change wrought among the 
Eskimo during that time than the Hudson's Bay Company has been 
responsible for among any of the northern Indians in a hundred years. 
The condition was now, therefore, serious, for the whaling industry 
was beginning to show the signs of a gradual breakdown, which has 
since terminated in a complete collapse of the industry. The winter 
of 1907-1908, only one ship, the /var/w/l-, commanded by Captain James 
Wing, had wintered at Herschel Island, and he had been so short 
of provisions and trading articles that the Eskimo considered them- 
selves to be suffering for want of many things to which they were used. 
It is true, as experience has since shown, that in the absence of 
whalers the Eskimo of the Mackenzie River are able to live per- 
fectly well on the game and fish of the country ; but they did not 
think so themselves the summer of 1908, any more than those of us 
used to high living think we can get along on the simple fare of the 
poor. The mounted police agreed with them in this, and every one 
therefore considered that they were facing a critical winter. Whal- 
ing ships had been expected, but none came. Finally, August 15th, 
the Karluk came in sight from the east, returning from the Banks 
Island summer whaling cruise. I went over to see Captain Wing and 
found that he was very short of stores ; indeed he was completely 
out of sugar and potatoes and many other articles, and had only a 
little flour left, but plenty of meat. 

My opinion agreed with that of no one else with regard to the pros- 
pects for the coming winter. It seemed to me the condition was nowise 




H o3 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 41 

serious. I had lived with the Eskimo the year before and had seen 
what an abundance of fish there was in the eastern channels of the 
Mackenzie delta, and I knew that fish and caribou were also plentiful 
farther east. But the whalers had never seen Eskimo living any- 
where except around whaling ships and dependent on them ; neither 
had the mounted police, and, consequently, it seemed to all of them 
that the district was facing a period of starvation. For myself and my 
party I did not worry however, except for one thing, — that I had 
no matches. When by the 15th of August it began to seem likely 
that no ships would come, I went to the mounted police and explained 
to them that I had everything that I considered necessary for mak- 
ing a living for myself and my party in the country with the excep- 
tion of matches, and asked them to give, lend, or sell my party a 
sufficient quantity to do us the winter. This the commanding 
ojfficer. Sergeant Fitzgerald, refused to do. He told me that if I 
would discharge all my Eskimo (I had then engaged a party of nine 
all told), and if Dr. Anderson and I would live for the winter in a small 
house which he would assign to us near the barracks, then he would 
supply us with not only matches, but also everything that we needed 
to eat. It was in vain I explained to him that we had not come 
to the country for the purpose of spending a winter at Herschel 
Island. His point of view was that he did not know or care why we 
had come, but he did know that we were now destitute and likely 
to die of starvation, and it was his duty to supply us, in a way that 
suited him, with sufficient food to keep us from actual want. We 
could not agree on the possibility of a white man making a living in 
the country. I told him that I needed but matches to be safe and 
independent, but he believed that a white man needed twelve 
months' provisions of white man's food in order to live twelve months 
in the country. He pointed out that according to his view one of 
two things was sure to happen if he gave us matches : either we should 
go to the eastward as far as the most easterly civilized settlement, 
four hundred miles to the eastward at the Baillie Islands, and there 
become a charge upon those natives, — in other words, we were in- 
competent to look after ourselves, and so would have to be taken 
care of by the Baillie Islands Eskimo, — or, in the other event, if we 
unwisely left the Baillie Islands settlement behind and went into the 



42 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

uninhabited district, we should surely starve to death, and he did not 
want, as an officer of the Government, to be a party to either event. 
He further informed me that the laws of the Yukon gave him a right 
to ship Dr. Anderson and me out of the country because we had no 
visible means of support. But, he said, seeing he could accom- 
phsh the same result by refusing us matches, he would prefer that 
method, and let us go west to Point Barrow for them. He knew that 
we would then winter at Point Barrow, where the whaling station has 
abundant stores, and where we should be in no danger of starving. 

I had previously gone to Captain Wing and tried to get matches, 
but he had none, or at least so few that none could be spared. He 
offered me, true enough, a package said to contain a thousand matches, 
and it seemed to me that we could go a long way on that, but this was 
quickly vetoed by Dr. Anderson and the Eskimo of our party, who 
were all of them smokers and did not hke the prospect of facing a 
winter without knowing they would be able to light a pipe whenever 
they felt like it. There was nothing for it, then, but to turn west along 
the coast towards Point Barrow, four hundred miles away. We knew 
it would take all the summer to get there, but Dr. Anderson and I 
quickly readjusted our plans and made up our minds we would, after 
getting the matches, attempt to spend the winter near the mouth of 
the Colville River, a district which from the point of view both of 
zoology and of ethnology was an attractive field of work. 

Captain Wing told us that eventually he intended to try to get 
to Point Barrow, but he did not know how long he would stay at 
Herschel Island. He promised, however, that on his way west along 
the coast he would keep a lookout for our boats, and if he overtook 
us he would take us aboard and give us a lift as far as Point Barrow. 
It turned out that three days after we started, Captain Wing overtook 
us some forty miles west of Herschel Island, for we had made slow 
progress on account of head winds. We decided then to divide our 
party. Dr. Anderson would proceed west along the coast in one of 
our whale-boats with the Eskimo men, Akpek and Natkusiak, and 
the woman Sungauravik, all of whom were Alaskans, while I took 
the other whale-boat and the Alaskan man Ilavinirk, his Mackenzie 
River wife, Mamayauk, and their daughter Nogasak aboard the 
Karluk with me to Point Barrow. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 43 

My favorite thesis is that an adventure is a sign of incompetence. 
Few have disputed the Greek, or whoever it was, that said, " Blessed 
is the country whose history is uninteresting," and no one (unless it be 
some journalist) will dispute the statement that "blessed is the ex- 
ploring expedition the story of which is monotonous." If everything 
is well managed, if there are no miscalculations or mistakes, then the 
things that happen are only the things you expected to happen, and 
for which you are ready and with which you can therefore deal. 
Being thoroughly alive to the truth of this principle, I am also 
thoroughly ashamed of owning up to such adventures as we have had, 
for they always reflect either on me, or the companions whom I have 
chosen, and therefore on me indirectly. By keeping steadily in view 
the two maxims, "Better be safe than sorry" and "Do in Rome as 
the Romans do," Dr. Anderson and I managed to conduct for nearly 
five years a satisfactorily monotonous expedition, and one the interest 
of which, so far as it has any interest, is in having attained the 
results which we set out to attain. 

But we did have some adventures, and the star part in one of them 
fell to me, August 16th, just after I had separated from Dr. 
Anderson's party, and when I was attempting to board the Karluk. 
It was a raw day, and we had all been sitting in our boats for hours, 
bundled up in as many clothes as we could possibly put on. When the 
Karluk came in we stood out to meet her. Within two hundred yards 
of us she shut down her engines, but was still moving with considerable 
speed when we brought our boat up alongside. I was standing in the 
bow and threw the painter over the gunwale of the Karluk to a group of 
men who were standing there to catch it. But they were apparently 
numb with cold, as I was, and fumbled the rope before getting hold 
of it. I forgot everything else and was staring at them, wondering 
if those fellows were ever going to get hold of the rope, when sud- 
denly my boat bunted the Karluk, my foot caught in something and I 
made a clean dive overboard, going down almost vertically, head first. 
One thinks of many things in moments such as that, and I realized 
at once that I could not swim, bundled up as I was, and especially 
wearing hip wading boots of sealskin. I kept my eyes open of course, 
and could see the moment I struck the water a bight of my painter, 
perhaps twelve or fifteen feet down, and fortunately I was making 



44 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

straight for it. When I got as far down as the rope I got hold of it 
with both hands, and then I knew the question was as to whether 
or not the men who had been fumbhng the rope end when last I saw 
them had by now succeeded in making it fast to the ship. If it were 
fast, it was problematic whether I could hold on or not, for the ship was 
still moving with considerable speed. There was also the possibility, 
which I realized fully, that the Captain might reverse his engine 
with the idea of stopping the ship quickly, and that my rope might 
be long enough to get me tangled in the propeller. It turned 
out that the rope end had been made fast. The rope quickly 
came taut, and for a moment until I reached the surface it took all 
my strength to hang on. As soon as I came up to where my Eskimo 
could see me, they hauled up on their end of the rope until the boat 
came up to me and then pulled me into the whale-boat. A few mo- 
ments later the Captain welcomed me on deck with the remark 
that this was "a hell of a way to come aboard a man's ship," and 
then handed me over to his engineer, Mr. Carpenter, who took me 
down to the warm engine room and dressed me up in a dry suit of his 
own clothes. 

The day after this little adventure we passed Flaxman Island, 
which lies a little less than halfway from Herschel Island to Point 
Barrow. Two years before, there had been wrecked at this point 
Leffingwell and Mikkelsen's exploring schooner, and Mr. Leffing- 
well had been living there ever since to do geological and other 
scientific work of an intensive character in the district around 
about, and especially in the Endicott Mountains, which here lie about 
twenty miles inland to the south. When we approached the island 
Mr. Leffingwell hailed the Karluk with the desire of taking passage in 
her for San Francisco. I made here another attempt to get matches, 
but although Mr. Leffingwell had some he did not consider he could 
let me have any without breaking faith with certain Eskimo among 
whom he had promised to divide them. Thus disappeared my last 
hope of not having to go all the way to Point Barrow to get matches. 

On our way west from Flaxman Island we kept seeing more and 
more ice, until we got within about thirty miles of Point Barrow, when 
our way was completely blocked by apparently impenetrable floes. 
Here we had the explanation of why the whaling vessels this year 




o 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 45 

had failed to come in to Herschel Island. There was an ice blockade 
at Point Barrow which none of them had been able to break through. 
Although the progress of the Karluk was arrested, it appeared that 
near shore, between the land and the ice, there was a narrow channel 
of shoal water. This is often the case on the Arctic coast, and that is 
why a vessel of shallow draught can often get along better than the 
most powerful ice-crusher, by simply hugging the coast and going 
in water too shoal for the bigger vessel. 

I was in a hurry to reach Point Barrow, so I bade good-by to 
Captain Wing and his officers and crew, all of whom had shown us 
the greatest kindness, and lowered the whale-boat to try to reach 
the whaling station along the shore. Mr. Leffingwell was also in a 
hurry and therefore took passage with us, to get as quickly as possible 
into communication with the whaling vessels which we felt sure 
would be lying tied up to the ice, or anchored just beyond Point 
Barrow. 

With the small boat we had no trouble. Part of the time 
we proceeded through lagoons, and part of the time along the 
beach between the deep grounded ice and the land. At Point 
Barrow, much to our surprise, we saw no vessels, and as there is 
nothing but a native village at the Point itself, we rounded it and 
stood nine miles down the coast to the house of Mr. Thomas Gordon, 
a man who has for many years held the distinction of living farther 
north on continental America than any other white man. Here 
again we were disappointed, for Mr. Gordon was not at home. Mrs. 
Gordon could give us only discouraging news, — no whaling vessels 
had yet been sighted this year, and the ice blockade continued along 
the coast, so far as they knew. Mr. Gordon had taken the small 
boat and gone down the coast with the idea of possibly finding the 
whaling fleet, thinking they might be in the ice in the neighbor- 
hood of the Sea Horse Islands. Three miles farther on we found Mr. 
Charles D. Brower, and were received by him into the (for that coun- 
try) sumptuous establishment of the Cape Smythe Whaling and 
Trading Company. The village of Cape Smythe, which coincides 
on the map with the post-office of Barrow, Alaska, is a town of a 
population in winter of over four hundred Eskimo, besides the white 
whalemen, the missionaries, and the school teachers. At this time the 



46 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

whalemen consisted of (besides the already named Mr. Gordon and 
Mr. Brower) Mr. John Hadley and Mr. Fred Hopson. The mis- 
sionary was Dr. H. R. Marsh, with his wife and four children, while 
in a government schoolhouse we found Mr. and Mrs. Charles 
Hawkesworth, with their assistant, Miss Annie Koodlalook, a returned 
Carlisle student of Eskimo parentage. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ice conditions, Mr. Brower told us, were worse this year 
than they had ever been before since 1884, when he first came 
to Point Barrow. In the worst previous seasons the ice 
had always been in motion parallel to the coast, even when it did not 
move away from the land enough to allow the coming of ships ; but 
this year it did not seem to be moving at all in any direction. The 
spring had been an early one, so far as the disappearance of snow 
from the land was concerned, but after all, temperature has practi- 
cally nothing to do with the navigability of the Arctic Ocean north of 
Alaska. It is entirely a matter of the prevailing winds. When 
westerly winds blow, the ice is blocked solidly against the land, while 
with easterly winds the ice goes abroad, leaving no obstructions to 
navigation. Four years later, in the summer of 1912, I saw the 
Polar Sea west of Point Barrow apparently as open as the Atlantic off 
Sandy Hook, — in spite of the fact that the summer of 1912 was the 
coldest of thirty years. 

Up to the 23d there was no change in the condition of the ice 
which lay offshore, white and apparently solid as in winter. Before 
the 24th, the wind changed to a northeaster, which blew steadily 
for three days. There were signs of motion in the ice on the second 
day. The third day there was a wide channel of clear water between 
the ice and the land. This channel widened until the ice was out 
of sight, and the fourth day the whaling ships came in, — the Beluga, 
Belvedere, Bowhead, Jeanette, Narwhal, and Thrasher. They had 
fought ice ever since rounding Point Hope, but had been longest 
delayed at Icy Cape. The U. S. Revenue Cutter Thetis had followed 
them as far as the Sea Horse Islands, but had turned around there 
with the timidity characteristic of revenue cutters. It cannot be 
that naval officers are essentially more timid than ordinary men, 
and the reason that the stoutly built and powerful government vessels 
turn tail when comparatively weak freighting and whaling ships 

47 



48 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

keep on into the ice, is no doubt the result of the general instructions 
under which the different craft sail. A whaler has to take risks and 
to get there at all costs. A whaling captain is justified in risking his 
ship, and even losing it, in an attempt to get to his destination; 
whereas the commander of a government vessel always finds ample 
excuse for failure but no excuse if he loses his vessel. 

The whalers that had arrived were all steamers, but they reported 
several sailing vessels to be following them close behind, — the Rosie 
H., under Captain Fritz Wolki, bound for the eastward trade; the 
schooner Challenge, Captain Theodore Pedersen, intending to sail 
around Point Barrow and to winter there ; and besides these, freighting 
vessels carrying goods to Mr. Brower, the Mission, the Government 
School, and to certain wealthy Eskimo who now carry on whaling 
on such a large scale that they buy groceries and other commodities 
by the tens of tons, wholesale. Several of the whalemen were old 
friends : Captain Jim Tilton of the Boiohead I had first seen at Her- 
schel Island in 1906, and Captain Porter of the Jeanette, at Herschel 
Island in 1907 ; Captain Steve Cottle and Mrs. Cottle, who always 
accompanies him on his whaling voyages, I had met several times, 
and last in July, 1907, when they found me doing archaeological work 
on an uninhabited island near the Colville and carried me thence 
east to Herschel Island, from which point I struck south across the 
mountains on my journey home from my first expedition; Captain 
George Leavitt of the Narwhal had entertained me aboard his ship 
in winter quarters at Herschel Island several times during the winter 
of 1906-07, and had now brought me a consignment of ammuni- 
tion, kerosene, alcohol for the preservation of scientific specimens, and 
various things of that sort, sent North in his care by the American 
Museum of Natural History. 

I had been compelled to come to Point Barrow for the lack of 
matches, but now that I was there I needed a great many other things, 
for the season was so short that I could not possibly get east to the 
Mackenzie River before the freeze-up. Instead of being able to 
winter in a region well supplied with fish and game, as I should have 
been had I obtained matches at Herschel Island, I was now compelled 
to winter on the northern coast of Alaska, where ten years before 
there had been vast herds of caribou, but where there now is prac- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 49 

tically no game at all. The let-alone policy of the Government, the 
cupidity of traders, and the ignorance of the Eskimo themselves have 
practically destroyed the caribou as the buffalo was destroyed in 
our own West. The situation here, however, was fundamentally 
different. In the West the destruction of the buffalo was a necessity, 
for he cumbered the land which the farmers needed for the planting 
of crops; but the caribou graze on lands where no crops will ever 
grow. Shooting buffalo for their hides and for sport destroyed them 
a few years before they would have had to go anyway ; but the shoot- 
ing of the caribou for the same reasons cannot be similarly extenuated, 
for had no more been killed than were needed for food and clothing 
for the population of the country itself, they would have lasted in- 
definitely, and would have been forever an economic resource not 
only for the Eskimo but for the country at large. 

As there could be no hope of our party "living on the country" 
the coming winter, I had to buy from the whaling vessels food enough 
to take us through twelve months. I had no money, for I expected 
to buy nothing in the Arctic, but fortunately, several of the whaling 
captains knew me and realized the circumstances; I had there- 
fore no trouble in getting what I needed. But perhaps of greater 
service to me than anything else was the generosity of Mr. Gordon, 
who put at my disposal a small sloop capable of carrying about five 
tons of freight. Without the use of this boat I should have been 
unable to transport to the eastward as many supplies as my party 
needed. And now that I had her my crew was insufiicient. I there- 
fore engaged Mr. Storker Storkerson, an energetic man whom I knew 
well, for he had been the first mate on the schooner Duchess of Bed- 
ford, of the Anglo-American Polar Expedition, He had come to the 
North aboard the Narwhal, intending to come into the service of Mr. 
Leffingwell, but now that Mr. LeflSngwell was going home, he willingly 
conceded to Storkerson his freedom, and I was thereby enabled to 
secure a competent sailor and an ideal man for the work I had in hand. 

We loaded the sloop and our whale-boat to their full capacity with 
about five tons of our own goods and a ton and a half of Mr. Leffing- 
well's, which we promised to try to deliver to the Eskimo who were 
working for him at Flaxman Island, about two hundred and fifty miles 
to the eastward. We also carried an Eskimo named Kunaluk, who 



50 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

worked for Mr. LeflSngwell. It was four o'clock in the afternoon of 
the 30th that we set sail from Mr. Brower's place at Cape Smythe, 
heading northeast through a thick fog for Point Barrow, which 
was about twelve miles distant. The wind was easterly, so that we 
were able to steer almost a straight course along the beach. Every 
two or three miles we would get too far offshore, and would have to 
tack in again. Of course each time we tacked we lost that much 
time, and Storkerson, who was in charge of the sloop, was keeping 
her up into the wind as much as possible. This circumstance was 
the cause of an adventure which came near being disastrous. 

I was in the bow of the boat, keeping a careful lookout ahead 
in the fog, for we expected that possibly we might suddenly run 
into grounded ice. The fog cleared a little, so that we had at least 
three hundred yards' warning of our approach to a small cake of 
grounded ice which lay about two hundred yards offshore. As 
Storkerson was a sailor and I was not, I did not presume to command 
the sloop, but merely suggested to him that we had better go to 
leeward of the cake of ice. We had plenty of time to discuss the 
matter, and I pointed out to him that I had always found it "bet- 
ter to be safe than sorry," and better to lose half an hour than 
to run the chance of an accident. But Storkerson said that there 
was no chance of an accident, that we would easily be able to 
clear the cake to windward. The sloop was making more leeway, 
however, than he thought, and when we were about twenty-five yards 
away from the cake Storkerson realized we were going to be unable 
to clear it, and therefore tried to tack ship ; but the sloop refused to 
go about, and before we knew it we had crashed at full speed into 
the ice and carried away our mast and rigging. Both of us thought 
that the boat was probably stove also, but this did not turn out to 
be the fact. She was so solidly built that she did not even spring 
a leak. I immediately jumped upon the cake of ice, carrying the 
painter of the sloop, and made her fast to the ice ; but the wind was 
blowing so hard offshore that it was hopeless for us unaided to try 
to get the crippled sloop ashore. 

The fog was still thick, and we expected no one to come along, 
for our whale-boat, manned by our Eskimo, had disappeared an 
hour before into the fog ahead of us, and we thought they 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 51 

would be at Point Barrow by now. No doubt they would 
eventually come back to look for us, but that was not hkely 
to happen for twelve or fifteen hours. As long as the wind con- 
tinued strong northeasterly we should be comparatively safe, 
although unable to get ashore ; but as soon as the wind changed to 
any other quarter the tide would immediately rise and our grounded 
cake would float off and be carried out to sea by the strong currents 
which continually sweep this coast. We had made up our minds to 
spending a few inactive hours on this cake of ice, waiting for some- 
thing to turn up, when all of a sudden there came out of the fog be- 
hind us our own whale-boat which had, because of the fog, been going 
closer to the shore than we, and had found some friends camped on 
the beach with whom they had stopped to drink a cup of tea. This 
was great luck for us. We got our ropes out, and found that these were 
long enough for the whale-boat to take to a second cake of grounded 
ice that lay halfway between us and the shore. When this was done, 
all of us landed on the second cake of ice, and then hauled the sloop 
hand over hand up to us. From this cake in turn the rope was run to 
the beach, and the second lap of the journey ashore was completed in the 
manner of the first. As soon as we reached solid land we got out the 
carpenter's tools, most of which had been in our whale-boat, andStork- 
erson went energetically at the repairs of the sloop. The mast had not 
broken close down to the deck, but within about ten feet of the top, so 
that after fifteen hours of hard work we had it spliced and were ready 
to put to sea again. 

The loss of this fifteen hours had been a serious blow to us, for no 
sooner had we gone ashore than the wind changed to a steady south- 
west breeze. Had we been in a position to sail, these fifteen hours 
of fair wind would have taken us at least sixty miles beyond Point 
Barrow. As it was, however, we lost not only fifteen hours, but about 
six hours more through the running away of our dogs, and the conse- 
quent search for them. When we finally rounded Point Barrow 
the fair wind had slackened to a gentle breeze which later on died 
down completely. The sloop was so heavy that she could not be 
rowed, and so we had to camp on a sandspit known to the Eskimo as 
Iglorak, which seems to be the same as that set down on the charts 
as Cooper's Island. We went ashore here and camped, but soon a 



52 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

strong northeaster blew up so suddenly that something had to be 
instantly done to save our heavily laden boats from being swamped 
in the breakers or crushed in the ice which was sure to come in within 
the next two or three hours. It took us but a few moments to 
bundle our camp gear into the boats, but unfortunately our dogs — 
some of them — had gone off on the island squirrel hunting, and we 
could not get them quickly. I did not dare to leave them alone on 
the island for fear they might get fighting and tear each other to 
pieces, so I let the boats go without me, telling them to run into 
shelter, if they could, behind the westerly end of the second island 
west of us, where we knew there was a channel where the Point 
Barrow lagoon could be entered. As soon as they had succeeded in 
getting into shelter, they were to unload the whale-boat and to come 
back with it to fetch me. 

The boats should have been back in two hours at the most, had 
all gone well ; but all did not go well, for they found the channel so 
crooked that they dared not run into it, and preferred to anchor on 
a lee shore under the shelter of a big cake of grounded ice. The 
chief danger here was that small cakes of ice might float in be- 
hind the big sheltering cake, and might break the boats in that way ; 
but as only small cakes could possibly do this, the boats were rendered 
comparatively safe by having a man with a long pole standing on 
guard. When a cake of ice came floating along he would not be able 
to stop it, but he might push it aside enough so that it would miss 
the boat. Storkerson and Kunaluk undertook this work while 
Ilavinirk landed the camping gear from our whale-boat and came 
back to fetch me. He got to me in about eight hours instead of two, 
as I had expected, and it was already nearly dark. We both of us 
got wet nearly to the neck in the breakers when carrying the dogs 
out into the boat, and. then we had perhaps the most exciting sail in 
which I have ever taken part. We used a storm sail reefed down 
close, but the wind was fairly strong, and the speed of the boat 
must have been seven or eight miles per hour. It was dangerous 
work scudding along like this through the darkness in a fragile 
cedar boat, with cakes of ice floating around you everywhere. We 
had several narrow escapes but no accident, and landed on the beach 
behind the grounded cake where Storkerson was guarding the sloop. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 53 

It was a bad night for Storkerson and Kunaluk, but fairly com- 
fortable for the rest of us who slept ashore. The next morning the 
wind had moderated enough so that it seemed safe to try running 
into shelter behind the island, and we did so successfully. The chief 
trouble with our sloop was that she was too heavily laden. She 
carried about a ton more than she had ever carried before, and had 
only about six inches of free-board. For that reason we devoted the 
next day to carefully battening down the manhole and generally 
getting her deck so waterproof that the waves might wash over the 
craft without danger of her filling. 

The ice had been on the coast all summer, and possibly this was 
the reason why we now had the indications of an extraordinarily early 
fall, which worried us considerably, for although we had no hope of 
being able to reach the IMackenzie River, we still had fully expected 
to be able to get to or beyond the Colville, where we should be fairly 
well situated for the pursuit of ethnological and zoological studies 
in the winter, and for archseological work in the spring. But thick 
ice was now forming on shallow water every night. It was with con- 
siderable relief, therefore, that on the morning of September 5th 
we sighted the schooner Rosie H. going eastward. We headed off- 
shore to her, told her our troubles, and got her to take Mr. Leffing- 
well's ton and a half of freight off our hands, for it seemed that her 
chances were really better than ours of being able to land the stuff 
at Flaxman Island. Captain Wolki also kindly took along some of 
my own gear, promising to try landing it at Flaxman Island. 

The afternoon of the 5th of September was the beginning of serious 
troubles for us, — troubles that were caused partly by untoward 
weather, but chiefly through the inaccuracy of the chart. We had 
been working eastward from Point Barrow along a continuous line of 
islands which the chart represents as ending near a place named 
Point Tangent, east of which the chart sets down a deep bay about 
five miles across. We came to the end of our island chain, and then 
followed the land along until, sure enough, we came to a bay. The 
chart was so perfectly definite in this quarter that we had no doubt 
this was the bay set down east of Point Tangent. We therefore 
steered southeast true, expecting to sight land in less than an hour 
at the furthest. But we kept going for several hours, and still no sight 



54 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

of land. Then it occurred to us that possibly the abundance of iron 
aboard our boats might have set our compasses wrong, and so we 
headed inshore, steering first south, and later on even southwest, 
but in spite of this we saw no land. After about six hours of sailing, 
and after going some fifteen or eighteen miles in crossing a bay that 
should have been only five miles wide, the sloop all of a sudden went 
aground in four feet of water. We had been having a southwesterly 
wind with a high tide; now all of a sudden the wind changed to 
northeast, and the tide went down perhaps two feet, — as it always 
does on this coast upon such a change of wind. The result was that 
not only was the sloop aground, but even the water through which she 
had come was now so shallow that she could not possibly get back 
over the same course. All the indications were that we must have 
gotten on to the mud flats of Smith Bay, but Smith Bay is the third 
and not the first bay east of Point Tangent, according to the charts. 
We know now that the two bays between Point Tangent and Smith 
Bay are purely mythical. Had we had the faintest suspicion that we 
were crossing the mouth of Smith Bay, we should have held our 
southeasterly course for twenty or twenty-five instead of ten or 
twelve miles and should have made Pitt Point easily before the 
change of wind. 

It blew cold from the northeast, and it snowed a little, — all 
together our night on the shoals was a very unpleasant one. Shortly 
after going aground in the evening, Kunaluk and I had got out of 
the boat with the idea of being able to push her off the sand bar where 
she stuck. We had been able to do this, only to find that she floated 
in a small depression, surrounded everywhere by sand banks that she 
could not cross to get out. We waded about here and there, gauging 
the depth of the water by about how far up it came on us as we waded. 
Mushy ice was already forming. I was wet well above the waist, and 
Kunaluk, being smaller, was wet nearly to his shoulders, so that he 
rather had the worst of it. Mamayauk, who usually kept her nerve 
under trying circumstances, was irrational and hard to get along with, 
and did not sleep all night, continually complaining that she did not 
see why we did not put ashore so that we might have a chance of mak- 
ing a fire and getting something warm to eat. We ah joined in pointing 
out to her that we had waded in complete circles around the sloop and 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 55 

that there was no way of getting anywhere until the tide should rise 
on the change of wind. " But," she argued, " if we stay here the wind is 
likely to blow up and the breakers will swamp us." We appreciated 
that point quite as weH as she did, but the fact remained that there 
was nothing to be done. 

The following day was clear and calm, with a slight rise of water. 
Low land was visible four or five miles to the south. Our exploration 
in the whale-boat that morning revealed the curious fact that while 
everything seemed hopelessly shoal out to seaward, we would be 
barely able to float the sloop landward into the channel of a river, in 
the delta of which we were evidently entangled. There was nothing 
to do but go ashore, — seeing we could, — for we knew that we 
could at any time, on a rise of the water, come back along the same 
channel to the place where we now were. By careful work we got 
the sloop within half a mile of shore, anchored her there, and all 
went ashore in the whale-boat. We pitched a tent, had a comfortable 
warm meal, and went to sleep. 

The next morning there was glare ice all over Smith Bay, and 
winter had set in. Three days later we took an improvised sled out 
to the sloop where she lay, solidly frozen in the ice, and began haul- 
ing our stuff ashore. Had either myself or any of my Eskimo been 
required to name the place along the whole coast where we were 
least willing to be overtaken by winter, we should have agreed in 
naming the foot of Smith Bay where we now were. There were no 
people near, there was practically no game, there was less driftwood 
than anywhere else, — the place had no redeeming features ; it was 
the deadliest, most desolate place on the whole coast. But of course 
we had to make the best of it. 

We hunted in all directions and got what game there was. Had 
we been just east to the mouth of Colville, where we should have 
preferred to be, we should have been able to get a few deer, the meat 
of which we did not need as much as we did the skins for clothing. 
In Smith Bay our game list for the entire time reads monotonously : 

September 9th : 6 marmots, 5 ptarmigan, 3 ducks. 

September 10th : 3 ptarmigan, 1 gull, 1 loon, 1 marmot, etc. 

The only variant came when on Sunday, the 30th, we got a 
solitary young swan. 



56 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

We employed much of our time in wishing for a chance to get 
away, and in making preparations to that end. Driftwood was 
scarce and of poor quahty, but still we managed to find sticks fairly 
suitable for sledge runners, and a sledge was constructed. Dog har- 
ness was made of sailcloth, and a stove and stovepipe out of some 
empty kerosene tins. 

The ethnologist has this advantage over other scientists who 
go to the polar regions, that he has a good field for investigations 
wherever he is not alone. The navigator is hampered by the winds 
and seasons; the secrets that the geologist tries to decipher are 
covered up in winter by a blanket of snow ; but the ethnologist can 
learn something about human nature wherever he has companions, 
and strange and unpleasant situations are likely to bring out peculiar 
and interesting phases of character. For our Eskimo our present 
situation was not essentially pecuhar, however; they are used to 
being overtaken by winter in places that do not suit them, and they 
simply put up with it as a matter of course. Their life goes on in 
the ordinary way, in the search for and the preparation of food, in 
the making of clothing, and in the exercise of their religious observ- 
ances. My notebook for this period is therefore not barren. I re- 
corded folk-lore stories which my Eskimo told each other in the even- 
ings when the day's hunting for marmot was over. 'T noted that 
Nogasak's milk teeth were pulled out by her mother with a piece of 
sinew and that they were not thrown away but were put carefully 
inside of pieces of meat and fed to dogs. It is a matter of wise 
forethought to do this, for were some evilly disposed man to get hold 
of one of your teeth, he could practice magic on you by practicing it 
on the tooth. This is the sympathetic magic known to many primi- 
tive peoples. You freeze a man's tooth, or a paring of his finger 
nails, or a lock of his hair, and you give him chills ; you put these, 
or any other parts from his body, near a fire, and he suffers with 
a fever; you let them drop, and he is likely to have a fall in the 
mountains and to break some of his bones if not to kill him- 
self. Some Eskimo therefore will burn a tooth, put it into a marmot 
hole, or throw it into the sea; but the Mackenzie River Eskimo 
believe the safest way is to feed the tooth to a dog. 

I learned also why it is that animals allow themselves to be killed 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 57 

by men. The animals are much wiser than men, and know every- 
thing in the world, — including the thoughts of men ; but there are 
certain things which the animals need, and which they can get only 
from men. The seals and whales live in the salt water, and are there- 
fore continually thirsty. They have no means of getting fresh water, 
except to come to men for it. A seal will therefore allow himself to be 
killed by the hunter who will give him a drink of water in return; 
that is why a dipperful of water is always poured into the mouth 
of a seal when he is brought ashore. If a hunter neglects to do this, 
all the other seals know about it, and no other seal will ever allow 
himself to be killed by that hunter, because he knows he is not going 
to get a drink. Every man who gives a seal a drink of water, and 
keeps this implied promise, is known by the other seals as a depend- 
able person, and they will prefer to be killed by him. There are other 
things which a seal would like to have done for it when it is dead, 
and some men are so careful to do everything that seals want that 
the seals tumble over themselves in their eagerness to be killed by that 
particular man. The polar bear does not suffer from thirst as much 
as the seal, for he can eat the fresh snow on top of the ice. But polar 
bears are unable to make for themselves certain tools which they 
need. What the male bears especially value are crooked knives and 
bow-drills, and the female bears are especially eager to get women's 
knives, skin scrapers, and needle cases ; consequently when a polar bear 
has been killed his soul (tatkok) accompanies the skin into the man's 
house and stays with the skin for several days (among most tribes, 
for four days if it is a male bear, and for five days if it is a female). 
The skin during this time is hung up at the rear end of the house, 
and with the skin are hung up the tools which the bear desires, ac- 
cording to the sex of the animal killed. At the end of the fourth or 
fifth day the soul of the bear is by a magic formula driven out of 
the house ; and when it goes away it takes away with it the souls 
of the tools which have been suspended with it and uses them 
thereafter. 

There are certain manners and customs of humanity which are 
displeasing to polar bears, and for that reason those customs are 
carefully abjured during the period when the soul of the bear is in 
the man's house. The bear, in other words, is treated as an honored 



58 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

guest who must not be offended. If the bear's soul has been properly 
treated during his stay with the man, and if he has received the 
souls (tatkoit) of implements of good quality, then he will report 
those things in the land of the polar bears to which he returns, and 
other bears will be anxious to be killed by so reliable a man. If 
the wives of certain hunters are careless about treating the souls of the 
bears properly while they are in their houses, this will offend the bears 
quite as much as if the man who killed them had done it, and this may 
cause an excellent hunter to get no polar bears at all. Certain women 
are known in their communities for this very undesirable quality, 
and if a woman becomes a widow, her reputation for carelessness in 
treating the souls of animals may prevent her from getting a good 
second husband. 

This and similar things the ethnologist who understands the 
language of the people he is among continually learns by merely 
being an observant member of the family. Direct questions seldom 
bring such things out, both because one does not know what to ask 
for, and because the Eskimo have a very definite idea of what sort of 
things it is that a white man believes in and approves of, and what 
sort of things he disbelieves in and ridicules, and they will in 
response to questions tell exactly the things that they think will be 
approved of by the questioner. But one who is a member of the 
family, as I was, learns everything as the children around him learn, 
by observation, and by listening to the conversations of everyday life, 
and especially to the folk-lore stories that are told whenever any one 
has leisure to listen. 

We learned also (a thing which has for generations been well 
known to the Eskimo) that Smith Bay is the delta of a large river 
hitherto unnoticed by map-makers. It is probably the largest river 
west of the Colville in northern Alaska. It is too large to have a 
name as a whole, apparently, but one of its mouths is known as the 
Mayoriak, from the circumstance that the Point Barrow Eskimo on 
their trading voyages to the Colville in the spring ascend this river 
for some distance, until they come to a large lake known as Tasirkpuk, 
or "the big lake." From the eastern end of this lake there is a short 
portage to another river, which has its mouth just west of the mouth 
of the Colville. This eastward route is pursued by the Point Barrow 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 59 

traders because it opens up earlier than the sea route along the coast. 
On their return journeys in the fall they never follow it, but come back 
by the sea. Going east, they carry skin boats (umiak) on their 
sleds as far as Smith Bay, where they take the water at the mouth of 
the Mayoriak. 




CHAPTER V 

N September 17th we considered that the sea ice was prob- 
ably strong enough for sled travel. The ice of Smith Bay 
had been strong enough for several days, but we feared — 
and with good reason I am sure — that east of Smith Bay the 
coast would still be open. In the afternoon of the 17th Ilavinirk 
and I took a small sled-load with the idea of going to Point Pitt 
at the eastern end of the Bay, to cache it there and to find out if 
conditions were propitious. We did not get quite that far, for 
about ten miles southwest of Point Pitt, well within Simpson Bay, 
we saw an Eskimo camp pitched on ground that rises a.bout twenty 
feet above the sea at the mouth of a small creek that comes out of 
a well-known fishing lake lying a few miles inland. 

This camp turned out to be returned traders who had been 
to the Colville and even to Flaxman Island to exchange ammunition, 
flour, tea, cloth, and other commodities — which they get cheaply 
at Point Barrow — for skins of caribou, mountain sheep and foxes. 
At Point Barrow these men work for the Cape Smythe Whaling & 
Trading Company, and for other white and Eskimo whalers. Some 
of the Eskimo at Point Barrow now carry on whaling on a large scale, 
maintaining as many as five or six boat crews. Irrespective of 
whether their employers are white or Eskimo, these men get each year 
as wages about two hundred dollars' worth of supplies. This means 
that the Point Barrow community leads an easier life than 
any other community does as a whole in any land where I have ever 
traveled. The whaling season in the spring is six weeks, and it is 
six weeks of fairly easy work at that. For all the rest of the year 
the men have nothing to do, — are their own masters, and can go 
wherever they like, while their employers must not only pay them a 
year's wage for six weeks' work, but also furnish them houses to live 
in, usually, and rations for the entire year. Of course the men are 
expected to get their own fresh meat, which they do by seal and wal- 

60 




Mackenzie River House in Summek. 
The doorway to the forty-foot alleyway is at the left of the picture. 




A Woman Dancing to the Accompaniment of Singing and Drum Beating — 
Flaxman Island, 1908. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 61 

rus hunting, and by cutting in the whales, — only the bone (balleen) 
of which goes to their employers. The employer supplies them with 
cloth for garments, and such suitable provisions as flour, tea, beans, 
rice, and even condensed milk, canned meats and fruits. Each man 
each year gets, among other things, a new rifle with loading tools and 
ammunition. The result is that firearms are probably nowhere in 
the world cheaper than they are at Point Barrow (or at least were, up 
to 1908). When I first came to Point Barrow you could buy a new 
Winchester rifle of any type, with loading tools, five hundred rounds or 
so of smokeless powder ammunition, and a considerable quantity of 
powder, lead^ and primers for five dollars in money ; had you bought 
the same articles wholesale at the factory in New Haven, the price 
would have been in the neighborhood of twenty dollars. There are 
few Eskimo who will use a rifle more than one year. They will no 
more think of using a last year's rifle than our well-to-do women 
will consider wearing a hat of last year's fashion, and you see rifles 
and shotguns, which our most fastidious sportsmen would consider 
good as new, lying around on the beach, thrown away by Eskimo 
who have no realization of their value because of the ease with which 
they have always obtained them in the past. The reason for all this 
is that whaling was, until a few years ago, so fabulously profitable an 
industry that the whaling companies cared scarcely at all what they 
paid for services as long as they got the whales. But now that the 
price of whalebone has suddenly gone down through the invention of 
a substitute, the Eskimo are facing a new era and the change will 
be hard on them. 

The pay-day of the Point Barrow Eskimo comes in the spring, 
and their employer hands them out rifles, ammunition, cloth, provi- 
sions, and various things which the people scarcely know what to do 
with. So they load them into their skin boats and take them east 
along the coast, to sell them at any point in the Colville or at Flax- 
man Island. To give some idea of the scale of prices it is worth 
while to say that one of the men whom we met returned with ten 
deerskins, which was ah he had received in the Colville River for a 
boat-load of supplies consisting of two new rifles, two cases of smoke- 
less powder ammunition for these, twenty-five pounds of powder and a 
corresponding supply of lead and shot, three bolts of cloth, a case of 



62 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

carpenter tools, some camp gear, three hundred pounds of flour, 
sixty pounds of good tea, two boxes of tobacco, and various other 
articles too numerous to mention. The ten caribou skins were of 
varying quality. The best of them were worth that year about five 
dollars apiece, and the total value of the ten skins could not have 
been more than thirty dollars. In other words, had this same 
Eskimo stayed at Point Barrow during the summer and been able 
to board a whaling ship with thirty dollars in his pocket, he could 
have bought ten deerskins of a corresponding quality, had they been 
carried by the ship, — although of course the ships carry only fairly 
good skins, averaging much better than the ten which he had secured 
in the Colville. 

These Eskimo told us that they had been overtaken by the 
freeze-up just east of Point Pitt and that they had come overland to 
this fishing lake where they were catching quite enough fish for them- 
selves and their dogs. Most of them expected to proceed to Point 
Barrow in a day or two, but two families intended to spend the winter 
living on the fish they could catch. 

We returned home the same day and remained in camp, waiting 
for this band of Eskimo to call on us on their way to Point Barrow, 
for we wanted to buy from one of them a set of whalebone sled- 
runners to use on our improvised sled. The next evening when they 
came they camped beside us, and immediately made preparations 
for setting fish nets. We had several excellent fish nets in our boat, 
and I had said to my Esldmo in the beginning that I thought we 
ought to put them out to see if we could catch any fish ; but they 
said very definitely that there were no fish here. At that time I 
had had no experience with Eskimo in a country new to them. I 
had dealt only with Eskimo near at home, and my experience with 
them was that they knew exactly where to put nets, and knew also 
what places were hopeless as fishing localities. I know now that the 
Eskimo temperament is that they never expect to find anything in 
any place where no one has found it before, so far as they know, and 
never having heard of any one catching fish in Smith Bay they had 
felt sure there would not be any. Now when these local Eskimo 
put out their nets, my Eskimo wanted to put out nets also, and argued 
vehemently our delaying our departure for a week or so, for they were 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 63 

fish-hungry. I, however, insisted on starting in the morning, and 
we put none of our own nets out, although we shared in the fish which 
the visitors caught in considerable numbers right at our very door. 
This was a valuable lesson to me, and has on many occasions en- 
couraged me to go into districts that the Eskimo considered devoid 
of game and in which I have usually found plenty. 

The following day, accordingly, we left Smith Bay for the east. 
We had long before carried ashore everything from the sloop, and had 
erected a platform cache, which is a safe cache in this country, for 
there are no wolverines, and polar bears will seldom go into the 
bottom of a deep bay, depending for their food on the seals which 
they find in the open leads that only occur outside a straight line 
tangent to the points of the coast. 

Our journey was at first entirely without incident. We found no 
Eskimo and we had expected to find none, although of course the old, 
ruined houses which indicate the large population that has vanished are 
scattered along the coast ; but at Cape Halkett, on the 23d of September, 
a surprise awaited us. We saw the masts of a ship evidently frozen into 
the ice a few miles offshore from Halkett. The next day we went 
out to investigate, and found that this was the gasoline schooner 
Olga, commanded by Captain William Mogg. The Olga had been 
attempting to get out to the Pacific from her whaling and trading 
voyage in the east. They had passed the Rosie H. just east of the 
mouth of the Colville, and were of the opinion that she, with my 
goods and Leffingwell's, would be frozen in behind the Jones Islands, 
just east of the Colville. On September 11th the Olga had run 
aground on a shoal about three miles off Halkett ; but for this mis- 
adventure she might have reached Point Barrow, but it took them 
so long to get her off with kedge anchors that a sudden spell of calm 
weather allowed the ice to freeze, and there they were, fast for eight 
months at least. The vessel was evidently in danger of two sorts : 
a strong on-shore wind was likely to crush up the ice, in which 
case it would crush the vessel with it ; or a strong offshore wind might 
carry the ice abroad, likewise taking the vessel with it. Captain 
Mogg had therefore wisely sent most of his more valuable stuff 
ashore on Cape Halkett Island. As he did not have provisions 
enough to winter, he was now preparing to abandon the Olga and to 



64 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

take his crew to Point Barrow, where Mr. Brower would be abun- 
dantly able to take care of them. 

Captain Mogg entertained us aboard with great hospitality for a 
day, and urged us to stay longer ; but we could not, for we suspected 
that Dr. Anderson with his party of Eskimo must be frozen in some- 
where east of Flaxman Island, and there was need that we should 
get together to formulate our plans for the winter. Moreover, I 
was not sure how he was getting along. I had faith in their ability 
to get fish and ptarmigan, even if caribou failed them, and in the 
mountains south of Barter Island, sixty miles east of Flaxman Island, 
mountain sheep were at that time known to be fairly numerous. 
Still, there is " many a slip " as the saying goes. We could not be 
completely at ease until we found out certain news of him, and I 
suspected he would feel similarly about us. 

In going eastward, September 27th, we found the ice off the mouth 
of the Colville still too thin for safe travel, and we had to go along 
the shore, thus nearly doubling our traveling distance, for the 
land has many and deep bights. We were able to shoot a few seal, 
and to get a ptarmigan, gull, or a duck now and then. We were in 
no danger of shortage of food, for our load consisted of over two 
hundred pounds of provisions, besides the ammunition and camp 
gear. The ducks and gulls, we noticed, were all traveling west 
parallel to the coast. 

Just east of the Colville, at a point known to white men and 
Eskimo alike as Oliktok, but which on charts is called Beachy Point, 
we had luck in seeing a band of caribou. There were nine of them, 
and between Ilavinirk, Kunaluk, and me we got seven. This was 
the first time in my experience that I had shot at caribou with 
Eskimo, and it was probably the first time in the experience of these 
Eskimo that they had ever seen a caribou killed by a white man. 
Ilavinirk and Kunaluk, accordingly, had some amusing arguments 
about the matter later on. They had agreed that neither one of them 
would shoot at a big bull caribou until the others had been killed, 
because he was sure to be poor and his skin would be less valuable than 
that of the younger animals; nevertheless the bull was dead now, 
and Ilavinirk said that I had killed it ; but Kunaluk said that could 
not be, and that one of them must have killed it by a stray shot, 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 65 

although admittedly neither of them had aimed at it. Ilavinirk 
and Kunahik had never hunted caribou together before, and we 
learned later that Kunaluk considered he himself had killed most of 
these caribou, and that I had certainly killed none — and it was 
doubtful whether Ilavinirk had killed any or not. But it was Eskimo 
custom — and by it he was willing to abide — that when three men 
shoot at a band of caribou, the booty shall be divided equally among 
the three. This did not suit me particularly, however, as I had been 
feeding and taking care of Kunaluk for some time, and I pointed out 
to him that by white men's custom all the animals belonged to me. 
I told him, however, that I was willing to concede the point only in 
the matter of the skins and would keep all of the meat. ; 

We stopped a day to make a platform cache for the meat, and that 
day Kunaluk, unaided, killed another caribou, so that we had the 
meat of eight to leave behind in cache. Three of the animals were 
skinned as specimens, and are now, with many others, in the American 
Museum of Natural History in New York. These are the first skins of 
caribou taken for scientific purposes on the north coast of Alaska 
east of Point Barrow. 

On October 8th, just west of the mouth of the Kuparuk River, 
I went inland alone and killed a young bull caribou which even Kuna- 
luk did not dispute had been shot by me. We had seen a band of 
caribou in another direction in the morning, and Ilavinirk and Kuna- 
luk had gone after them, but with no success. In the afternoon, 
however, the three of us together killed another bull caribou, so that 
at the mouth of the Kuparuk also we were able to leave behind a 
cache of meat. These we expected to be useful some time later in 
the winter when we should come back over the same trail. 

The low, coastal plain of northern Alaska is triangular in shape, 
with its apex at Point Barrow, perhaps two hundred miles north from 
the base, which is formed by the east and west running Alaskan spur 
of the Rocky Mountains, which comes within a few miles of the 
coast in eastern Alaska at the international boundary and meets 
the ocean in western Alaska at Cape Lisburne. This plain is so 
nearly level that in most places it is not possible, in going inland, 
to determine offhand whether you are going up hill or down. The 
rivers are all sluggish, but thirty or forty miles inland most of them 



66 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

run between fairly high banks, which shov/s that the land does slope 
up, even though imperceptibly, towards the foothills. Just east of the 
Colville River at Oliktok, the mountains are probably about eighty 
miles inland. As you proceed eastward along the coast they be- 
come visible from near the mouth of the Kuparuk. Continuing east- 
ward they get steadily nearer the coast, and apparently higher, until 
their distance from the sea is not more than six or eight miles at 
Demarcation Point, while their highest places are probably about 
ten thousand feet in elevation and lie southward from Flaxman and 
Barter islands, where they contain a few small glaciers. 

^ This whole coastal plain was a few years ago an immense caribou 
pasture and inhabited by hundreds of Eskimo who lived mostly on 
the meat of the caribou. Of late years the country has been de- 
populated through the disappearance of the caribou, j This fact 
explains the United States census returns as to the population of 
northern Alaska. To any one ignorant of the facts, the census figures 
seem to prove that the population of northern Alaska has remained 
stationary during the last two or three decades. This is so far 
from being true that I am certain the population is not over ten per 
cent now of what it was in 1880. The trouble arises from the fact 
that the census covered only the coastal strip. The village of Cape 
Smythe contained probably about four hundred inhabitants in 1880, 
and contains about that to-day. But only four persons are now living 
who are considered by the Eskimo themselves to belong to the Cape 
Smythe tribe, and only twenty or twenty-one others who are descended 
from the Cape Smythe tribe through one parent. The fact is that 
the excessive death rate of the last thirty years would have nearly 
wiped out the village but for the fact that the prosperity of the 
whaling industry there year by year brought in large numbers of immi- 
grants ; so that while thirty years ago it was safe to say that seventy- 
five per cent of the four hundred Eskimo at Cape Smythe must have 
been of that tribe, no more than seven per cent can now be considered 
to belong to it. The difference is made up by the immigrants, who, 
according to their own system of nomenclature, belong to a dozen 
or more tribes, and hail from districts as far apart as St. Lawrence 
Island in Bering Sea, and the mouth of the Mackenzie River in Arctic 
Canada,'while the majority come from inland and from the headwaters 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 67 

of the Colville, Noatak, and Kuvuk rivers. It seems that the inland 
Eskimo, who by their head-form and other physical characteristics 
show clearly their admixture of Alaskan Indian blood, are more 
hardy than the coast people, or at least are less susceptible to the half 
dozen or so particularly deadly diseases which the white men of re- 
cent years have introduced. But hereafter the census figures will 
begin to be more truthful, for now the northern interior of Alaska is 
all deserted, and no recruits can come down from the mountains to 
fill in the vacant places left by diseases among the coastal Eskimo. 

It was the vanishing of the caribou from the interior coastal plain 
that drove down the Eskimo to the coast, and now it seems that the 
caribou are having a slight chance, for in large districts where for- 
merly they had to face the hunter, their only enemy is now the wolf. 
Temperamentally, the Eskimo expects to find everything next year 
as he found it last year ; consequently the belief died hard that the 
foothills were inexhaustibly supplied with caribou. But when star- 
vation had year after year taken off families by groups, the Eskimo 
finally realized that the caribou in large numbers were a thing of the 
past; and they were so firmly impressed with the fact, that now 
they are assured that no caribou are in the interior, as they once 
thought they would be there forever. 

One result of this temperamental peculiarity was this, that during 
the winter of 1908-1909 there were numerous families huddled around 
Flaxman Island (where, as it turned out, the Rosie H. was wintering) 
with the idea that it was impossible for them to get caribou for 
food or for clothing, w^hile we went inland to where every one said 
there was no game, and were able to live well. Our own small party 
that winter in northern Alaska killed more caribou than all the rest 
of the Eskimo of the country put together, because we had the faith 
to go and look for them where the Eskimo " knew " they no longer 
existed. 

At the Kuparuk River, after we had killed the two bull caribou 
spoken of above and cached the meat safely, we saw an abundance 
of tracks, and there is no doubt that had we stayed there to hunt we 
could have secured a comparative abundance of meat. But our chief 
anxiety now was to communicate with Dr. Anderson, and so we hurried 
on down the coast. Traveling at this time of the year on this por- 



68 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

tion of the northern coast of America is comfortable enough, for every 
few miles, — and in some cases every few hundreds of yards, — you 
find an abundance of driftwood for fuel. We therefore carried a sheet- 
iron stove which we used in our tent, and which made it a very cosy 
place indeed, even in stormy weather. In the fall, however, sledg- 
ing is often heavy on account of the salt water which, curiously 
enough, remains unfrozen, even in cold weather, on top of the ice in 
many places. Because of this water on the ice one is compelled in 
the early fall to wear boots with waterproof soles. The snow also 
cakes between the dogs' toes, rendering them footsore. The hauling 
weight of the sleds is doubled or trebled by the inch or so of 
soaking wet snow on top of the ice. In looking over an expanse of 
icy sea the snow everywhere looks white and dry, but the feet of men 
and dogs and the runners of loaded sleds break continually through 
this dry and soft upper layer into the salty slush below. 

We reached Flaxman Island October 12th, to find the Rosie H. 
there in winter quarters, and Dr. Anderson staying in Mr. LeflSng- 
well's house, which he did at the invitation of Mr. Ned Arey, an 
American miner of Mayflower descent who has lived in the northern 
country for the last fifteen or twenty years, and who, during Mr. 
LeflBngwell's stay in the region, had been associated with him con- 
tinually, and now, in a manner of speaking, represented him locally. 
Mr. Storkerson, whom I had found in every way an excellent man, 
quit our service at this place. My chief reason in engaging him in the 
beginning was that I wanted him to sail the sloop. Misfortunes had 
prevented our getting the sloop any distance to the eastward, and I now 
no longer needed his services. He, for his part, considered himself 
under obligations to Mr. Leffingwell, and told me that he believed Mr. 
Leffingwell's outfit at Flaxman Island, which consisted not only of 
his dwelling house there, but also of valuable gear such as chronom- 
eters and other expensive scientific instruments, as well as books, 
firearms, and other property, were likely to be stolen during 
the winter by Eskimo and might even be misappropriated by 
white men. The reasons Mr. Storkerson gave were perfectly 
satisfactory to me, especially as I wanted to decrease the size of my 
party, and he accordingly took possession of Mr. Lefiingwell's house 
and lived in it that winter on the stores which he found already 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 69 

there and on others which he purchased from Captain Wolki of the 
Rosie H. 

Dr. Anderson told me that his party had been able to reach by 
open water Barter Island, which lies about sixty miles east of Flaxman 
Island. At this point they were overtaken by the frost September 6th, 
the same day we were in Smith Bay, over two hundred miles farther 
west. They tried to feed themselves and their dogs by setting fish 
nets along the coast, but met with httle success, and were there- 
fore compelled to abandon their coast camp temporarily and to go 
inland up the so-called "Oolahoola" River, where they were more suc- 
cessful in the capture of brook trout and other fish, as well as in the 
killing of ptarmigan and marmot. They had also secured half a dozen 
caribou, but having over twenty dogs, they had not much more than 
made their living. 

At Flaxman Island Dr. Anderson and I talked over plans for the 
winter in detail. From a zoological point of view it seemed most 
important for him to go into the mountains south of Barter Island 
in search of the scientifically unknown mountain sheep, which would 
probably prove to be a variety of the Ovis dalli, and which, by native 
account, were fairly abundant. He would later on, if everything went 
well, go still farther south, beyond the mountains and the mountain- 
sheep country, into the Yukon Valley, where he hoped to take some 
specimens of the also scientifically unknown caribou of northern 
Alaska. These plans of his eventuated very well. During the 
four months that intervened between this and our next meeting 
he secured numerous specimens of sheep, caribou, and other far 
northern mammals, and incidentall}^ had his first experience of "liv- 
ing on the country." In fact the caribou proved much more abun- 
dant than we had hoped for ; so abundant that had it not been for a 
shortage of tobacco. Dr. Anderson would have found considerable 
difficulty in inducing the Eskimo to leave the fleshpots and com- 
fortable forest camps of the Yukon slope for the Arctic coast, where 
they could look forward to nothing better than living on the provisions 
we had purchased at Point Barrow; and living on "white men's 
grub" is always a hardship to an Eskimo. It was, incidentally. Dr. 
Anderson's first experience of living without salt, an ordeal which 
he had much dreaded, for he shared the common belief that salt is a 



70 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

necessary article of diet. But it turned out, as I knew from experi- 
ence it would, that he did not mind it seriously. 

I Most people are in the habit of looking upon the articles of our 
accustomed diet, and especially upon salt, as necessities. We have 
not found them so. The longer you go without grain foods and vege- 
tables the less you long for them. Salt I have found to behave like 
a narcotic poison — in other words, it is hard to break off its use, as 
it is hard to stop the use of tobacco ; but after you have been a month 
or so without salt you cease to long for it, and after six months I 
have found the taste of meat boiled in salt water distinctly disagree- 
able. In the case of such a necessary element of food as fat, on the 
other hand, I have found that the longer you are without it the more 
you long for it, until the craving becomes much more intense than is 
the hunger of a man who fasts. (The symptoms of starvation are 
those of a disease rather than of being hungry.) Among the unciv- 
ilized Eskimo the dislike of salt is so strong that a saltiness imper- 
ceptible to me would prevent them from eating at all. This circum- 
stance was often useful to me later in our travels about Coro- 
nation Gulf, for whenever our Eskimo visitors threatened to eat us 
out of house and home we could put in a little pinch of salt, and thus 
husband our resources without seeming inhospitable. A man who 
tasted anything salty at our table would quickly bethink him that he 
had plenty of more palatable fare in his own house. 

The experience of Dr. Anderson's party during the time they 
spent in the mountains of Arctic Alaska were as interesting as any 
during our whole expedition, and he has often told them to me, but 
they are his story and it is his place to tell it. 

Dr. Anderson took with him of our party of Eskimo only Ilavin- 
irk and Mamayauk, with their eight-year-old daughter Nogasak, 
but several other Eskimo voluntarily joined his fortunes and accom- 
panied him south. My own chief interests were in the people of 
the country rather than in its sheep and caribou ; I accordingly turned 
west along the coast with the intention of spending some time on the 
Colville River, which I supposed to be inhabited by a few families 
of inland Eskimo. My companions were a man who had been born 
in the Colville River district named Akpek, with his wife Sungauravik 
and a Port Clarence man named Natkusiak. I had engaged Akpek 




Sledging over Barren Ground in Summer. 

Making use of ice foot of small lake. Man has stripped and dog lies in ice water on 

account of heat. 




Sledging over Barren Ground in Summer — Sled on Top of Ridge. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 71 

and his wife on Ilavinirk's recommendation. Ilavinirk had known 
Akpek some six or eight years before when he had been an energetic 
and successful hunter, but his wife Ilavinirk did not know at all. She 
was a strong-looking and prepossessing woman, and I had said to 
Ilavinirk when he recommended Akpek to me that I would take him 
on his recommendation, but that I would take his wife on my own 
judgment, for she was, as any one could see, a capable and competent 
person. It turned out that Akpek had been taken, since Ilavinirk 
knew him, with the common complaint of the country — tuberculosis 
— and was so weakened by it that his prowess as a hunter was largely 
gone ; while his wife turned out to be the laziest and most slovenly 
person that I have dealt with among the Eskimo, proving inciden- 
tally that I am no better at reading Eskimo character than I am at 
reading that of my own countrymen. Poor Akpek was willing 
enough had he had the strength to hunt, but his weakness kept him 
to the camp and the result was that he did much of the cooking and 
housework. The more difficult tasks of all kinds fell upon Natkusiak 
and me. The lady Sungauravik seldom turned a hand to anything 
useful. 

The three Eskimo and I with two sleds and eleven dogs left 
riaxman Island, going west, October 20th. On our arrival there, 
ten days before, we had reported the fact that caribou were to be found 
in some numbers to the westward, and a man by the name of Oyarayak 
had gone west with his family to try his fortune. Our second day out 
we met him coming back east to Flaxman Island with a small sled- 
load of caribou meat which he intended to sell to Captain Wolki of 
the Rosie H. He had killed six deer, it seemed, and had left his wife 
and two children to take care of the greater part of it while he 
went to Flaxman Island to sell some of it for ammunition and tea. 
He invited us to proceed to his camp and pitch ours beside it, for 
there was plenty of meat for all (for a day or two) and his wife would 
be glad of a neighbor while he was away. Accordingly we headed for 
the place indicated, reached it in two days, and hunted south from 
it for two days, but with no success. We saw on the first day a 
few deer, it is true, but through mismanagement were unable to get 
near enough to them to shoot. Oyarayak' s meat supply was 
getting noticeably smaller on the third day, so we decided it was 



72 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

better for Oyarayak's wife and family to be neighborless than 
hungry, and proceeded west toward the meat cache we had made 
October 8th near the Kuparuk River and hunted from there again, 
Hkewise without success. The few caribou tracks we found seemed 
to be about two weeks old. 

pAt most seasons of the year one is considerably troubled with 
mirages ; perhaps more in summer than in winter, but in winter also. 
On my hunts at this time I was frequently deceived not so much by 
the mere appearance of objects out of all natural proportion, but more 
especially by their apparent motion and their disappearances and 
reappearances on the level snow surface. Where the only game to 
be expected is caribou you take it for granted that whatever black 
speck you see is probably a caribou and the probability ordinarily 
becomes a certainty if you see the thing move. I was a little inex- 
perienced in these matters and during the three or four days we 
camped near the Kuparuk River I several times allowed myself to be 
deceived by black specks moving on the distant horizon, exactly after 
the manner of caribou. That there could have been no living thing 
was always eventually shown by the fact that there was no trail 
left in the spotless snow. The mountains inland were visible and 
were continually changing their shapes but they seldom looked like 
real mountains. More frequently they simulated the water-front ap- 
pearance of New York sky-scrapers, even to chimneys and whiffs 
of smoke. They would continually change their shape and order, 
and at times seemed to be marching in single file either to the east 
or west. 

I think it is David Hanbury who tells of mistaking a lemming for 
a musk-ox, and Lieutenant Gotf red Hansen speaks of being astounded 
by the courage with which his dogs attacked a polar bear, and of 
being dumfounded not only at seeing them killing the bear but more 
especially at one of the dogs bringing the bear back in his mouth. 
It turned out, of course, that the polar bear had been an Arctic fox. 
In things of this sort there is always a certain amount of suggestion ; 
Hanbury had his mind centered on musk-oxen, and Hansen was ex- 
pecting to see a polar bear. On one occasion when I had strongly 
in mind the scientific value, as well as the food value, of the grizzly 
bear, I discovered a grizzly sitting on a hill slope outside of his den. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 73 

for it was October and they had already "holed up." I was sur- 
prised to find the bear awake so late in the season, but delighted at 
my opportunity not only of securing meat and a valuable skin but 
also of seeing the animal's habitation ready for its winter occupancy. 
After giving an hour or so to a lengthy detour by which I was en- 
abled to approach the animal from behind under cover of the hill in 
the slope of which his den was located, I found nothing but a few 
marmot tracks and a small heap of earth upon which the marmot 
had been sitting an hour before. Such things happen continually. 

The main reason for such cases of self-deception is that one sees 
things under circumstances that give one no idea of the distance, and 
consequently one has no scale for comparison. The marmot at twenty 
yards occupies as large a visual angle as a grizzly bear at several 
hundred, and if you suppose the marmot to be several hundred yards 
away you naturally take him for a bear. There is, under certain 
conditions of hazy Arctic light, nothing to give you a measure 
of the distance, nothing to furnish a scale to determine size by 
comparison. 

After a few days of vain hunts and mirage-chasing, we started 
west along the coast again, and on October 30th we saw caribou. 
When we caught sight of the band they were about to disappear 
behind a hill, and we could not tell exactly what direction they would 
take, Natkusiak and Akpek therefore went one way and I another 
to try to head them off. It turned out that I missed the animals, 
but the Eskimo came up with the band, and in a fusillade of thirty 
or forty shots at fairly close range they secured two caribou. The 
poor shooting was no doubt due chiefly to a slight fog which made 
them overestimate the distance. The animals were really much 
closer than they appeared ; under the impression they were far off, 
the hunters raised their rifle-sights and consequently shot over. It 
is the great advantage of such a rifle as the Mannlicher-Schoenaur 
that it has a comparatively flat trajectory and one does not have to 
worry so much about judging distances as one has to with an ordinary 
rifle such as my Eskimo used. 

October 31st Oyarayak and his family overtook us, coming from 
the east. We had been moving slowly, partly with the expectation of 
Oyarayak's coming, for he had, when we met him before, expressed 



74 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

a desire to accompany us to the Colville, to visit his daughter, who 
was being brought up by a Colville Ptiver family. November 1st, 
while our two sleds and Oyarayak's were moving west along the 
sea ice, I hunted, according to my usual custom, parallel to the coast a 
few miles inland. I was looking for caribou or their tracks, but on 
this day, somewhat to my surprise, I found not what I was looking 
for but the recent trail of a polar bear instead, leading directly inland. 
The Eskimo had seen the tracks also on the coast, and I could see 
through my glasses that they had stopped to consult over them. 
Clearly this was the trail of a female going inland to hibernate, a 
thing which the male polar bears never do, so far as I know. It seemed 
to me likely that we could overtake the animal if we made pursuit 
at once, so I hurried down to where the Eskimo were and told them 
to make camp, while Natkusiak and I with a light sled took the trail. 

We followed the trail inland all the rest of that day and all the 
next. It had been the opinion of the Eskimo that half a day's journey 
would surely bring us to where the animal had stopped to dig a hole 
in some soft bank to spend the winter there ; but in this, as in many 
other opinions about the habits of animals, the Eskimo were wrong. 
We followed without result the first day and all of the second. It 
was bitterly cold and the snow drifted a little, but we should probably 
not have given up the chase even on the third day except for the 
complication that arose that morning in finding all of our dogs missing 
when we emerged from our tent after breakfast. The probability 
was that a band of caribou had passed us to windward in the night ; 
the dogs had probably scented them and had gone off on a hunt of 
their own. Natkusiak and I accordingly went out in different direc- 
tions, not so much caribou hunting as dog hunting. I happened 
upon a band of caribou, however, of which I secured only one. 

There seemed to be no prospect of overtaking the bear, for evi- 
dently she had been moving not only in a direct line for the moun- 
tains, which were visible to the south from our turning point, but she 
had never stopped more than a moment at a time and then only to 
dig up a little moss on which she had been feeding. We decided, 
therefore, to load on our sled the meat of the deer killed and start for 
the coast, which we did even though our best dog had not returned ; 
the rest had straggled home to camp during the day, and one had been 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 75 

following by scent the caribou I killed and had come up to us where we 
were skinning it. 

It took us two days to get back to the coast where we had left our 
Eskimo in camp. We found only a vacated camp site, however — they 
had evidently moved on to the west with the intention of reaching 
Oliktok, where we had cached the meat of eight caribou about a month 
before. Although we reached the coast only after dark, the trail of 
our party was plainly to be seen and we followed it, getting to their 
camp about midnight to find that our lost dog Lindy had preceded 
us by a few hours. He had evidently been lost and wandering 
about inland for two days. He was more tired than the dogs that 
had had the work of hauling our sled, and hungrier, poor fellow. I 
thought he looked as if he were sorry — not so much sorry, I 
fancied, that he had missed his meals, but sorry that he had not 
been there to help us with the heavy loads. I had not the slight- 
est suspicion that he had run away from us to escape from hauHng. 
That was not his way. During the two years we worked together 
he never shirked a pound in fair or foul weather. He seemed to con- 
sider doing his part a privilege as well as a duty. He had come into 
our service on the Mackenzie River four months before the time of 
which we are writing, and we were just beginning to know each other. 
He was an Indian's dog but with a white man's self-respect and sta- 
bility of character. During the two years that followed we grew 
closer and closer together. I do not know which of us was fonder of 
the other. When he came to die I lost my best friend in the world, 
whom I shall never forget. 

The last few miles of our road home from the bear hunt, the even- 
ing of November 6th, we had a headwind of about fifteen miles an hour 
— just enough so the snow was drifting along the ground. Although 
we had had winter for about two months none of us had suffered a 
frost bite, but this evening Natkusiak froze his face considerably. 
It is one of the common superstitions about the North that Eskimo as 
a class can stand more cold than white men. As a matter of fact the 
readiness with which a man's face freezes is an individual rather than 
a racial characteristic. It depends, no doubt, partly at least, on the 
blood circulation. It happened that although Natkusiak could stand 
the cold in a general way better than any other member of our 



76 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

party, white or Eskimo, he was always each year the first to freeze 
his face, and kept freezing it continually all winter. Of course a 
frozen cheek or nose is no more serious than a sunburn, if you thaw it 
out with your warm hand promptly so soon as it begins to freeze. 

It is curious how many an Arctic explorer has carried with him 
through lengthy experience in the North superstitions about cold 
which have grown up among his ancestry in warm climates. One 
of these superstitions is that when your face or any other part of 
your body begins to freeze you must thaw it out with an application 
of snow. Few things could be more absurd. Any high-school pupil 
could tell us offhand what would happen if liquid air were applied 
to a man's cheek or nose; of course the part would freeze in- 
stantly. The same would be true of the snow of carbon dioxide, 
and the same is true of the snow of water except, of course, that 
the freezing will not be so nearly instantaneous. 

Nothing I have read in the literature of the Arctic ever impressed 
me more than the account of one of the famous explorers of half a 
century ago who tells how he dealt with a frost bite. The story runs 
substantially as follows : A sledge party was traveling along one day 
when the commander of a sudden noticed a small spot of white the 
size of a ten-cent piece upon poor Mr. So-and-So's cheek. With 
promptness upon which he prides himself in the narrative, he imme- 
diately ordered a halt and camp to be pitched, and while the other 
men of the party were thus occupied the commander rubbed poor 
Mr. So-and-So's cheek with snow, but "so intense was the cold," he 
tells us, that before camp was finally pitched the wretched man's 
entire face was frozen. 

Such ignorance of elementary things as this story shows can be 
justified only by pointing out that a great many other Arctic explorers 
have known no better. Even in a warm room it would be possible 
to freeze a man's whole face by rubbing it with snow which was 
brought in from out-of-doors when the temperature was anything 
below minus 40° F. The whole secret of dealing with frost bites is 
to keep your hands warm, and (when the weather is severe) to run 
your hand over your face every few minutes to see if any part of it be 
frozen. Usually you can also keep yourself fairly well informed of 
the condition of your face by continually wrinkling it and " making 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 77 

faces." If a spot of skin on your cheek or chin the size of a twenty- 
five-cent piece becomes stiff you can always detect it by making a 
grimace. Then all you have to do is take your warm hand out of 
your mitten and press it on the frozen spot for a moment until the 
whiteness and stiffness are gone. In the very coldest of weather our 
method of taking care of the face is a little different, however. When 
a man is properly dressed for winter his coat is a loose-fitting one 
with the sleeves cut so that any time he likes he can pull his arm out 
of the sleeve and carry his hand on his naked breast inside his coat. 
The neck of the coat is made loose, and whenever any part of his face 
refuses to wrinkle up he pushes his hand up through the loose-fitting 
neck of the coat and presses it for a moment on the stiffened portion of 
the face. So soon as the frozen spot is thawed out he pulls his hand 
in upon his breast again. In this way one can walk all day facing 
a steady breeze at — 35° or — 40° F., which is the worst kind of 
weather one ever gets in the Arctic, for when the temperature falls 
to — 50° or below — 50° there is always a dead calm. Apparently 
the friction of air in motion raises the temperature, for if there be a 
calm at — 50° and the wind begin to rise, then the temperature rises 
as the wind rises until at sixty miles an hour the temperature will 
generally be up to + 10° or + 15° F. at any time of winter. A sixty- 
mile wind at 0° F. feels colder and does more damage than a fifteen- 
mile wind at — 30° or a calm at — 50°. 

One more thing is essential to keep the face from freezing; it 
must always be clean shaven. For if you wear a beard the moisture 
of your breath congeals on it and makes for you a face mask that is 
separated by an air space of a quarter of an inch or so from the skin 
of your face. If then you begin to freeze you cannot get at your 
cheek or chin to thaw it out with the warm palm of your hand, as you 
could do in a twinkling if your face were smooth shaven. On my first 
expedition, before I fully realized this fact, I once traveled against a 
rather warm blizzard all day, and not only my breath froze on my 
beard but also the snow which struck my face melted and formed ice, 
until a mask covered my whole face. I tried at first to thaw the ice 
off with my hands, but I soon saw I had to choose between having my 
face freeze and having my hands freeze, and of course there Is no 
choice ; your hands and feet you must protect at all costs. The 



78 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

result was that when I got into camp in the evening the ice mask I 
wore must have weighed several pounds. It covered all my face 
except that I had kept one eye open, allowing the other to freeze 
over. A day or two later the skin began to peel off all the way from 
above my eyebrows to my "Adam's apple." The weather had not 
been very cold and the freezing proved to be only skin deep, but 
had I been smooth shaven my face would probably not have frozen 
at all. On another occasion when I got lost alone, and had to build 
a snow house (without a fire) in which to sleep overnight, my beard 
had frozen so solidly to the hood of my coat that it took me several 
hours of thawing away with my hands after I got into camp before 
I could pull my coat off, with the result that there thawed on me and 
made me soaking wet some snow which had blown in between my 
outer and inner coat through a rent in the outer one, and which I 
could have shaken out in a moment had I been able to pull the outer 
coat off. But it would not come off — my beard and the lining of 
the hood were welded by a mass of ice. 

The most elementary thing, then, to keep your face from freezing, 
is to keep it smooth shaven. A face mask of skin or cloth is of no 
avail. It protects you for half an hour or so in the morning, but 
then ice forms upon it, and no matter what the material may be to 
begin with, the mask becomes an ice mask and gives you no further 
comfort. By actual trial I have found also that the hood you wear 
should not come close around the face. «The typical Eskimo hood 
merely covers the ears and leaves the whole forward half of the head 
unprotected. The first improvement that a white man usually tries 
to make on Eskimo clothing is that of having the hood come farther 
forward so as to "fit snug about the face" and leave but a small part 
of it exposed. The result is that if the hood comes out to the cheek 
bones and to the point of the chin, a circle of hoarfrost forms on the 
face along the edge of the trimming of the hood, and presently the 
skin under the hoarfrost ring freezes. On the other hand, if the face 
is completely bare there is a sufficient distance between the nose and 
mouth on one side and the trimming of the coat on the other so that 
the breath in very cold weather freezes before it reaches the trimming 
of the coat and settles upon it in the form of snow which can be 
brushed off, rather than in the form of ice, as when the trimming 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 79 

is only an inch or two from one's mouth. Every few minutes, then, 
with your mitten you brush the snow from your hood trimming and 
keep your face free of ice, giving your warm hand opportunity to 
thaw out any frost bite that may appear. 

The Eskimo, although physically no better fitted for withstanding 
cold than we, know so much better than most of us how to deal with 
cold that they give the uninitiated the impression of greater hardi- 
hood, but a white man who keeps his eyes open soon acquires all the 
winter lore that is of great value and becomes quite the equal of the 
Eskimo in taking care of himself. There is no art in keeping your 
hands and feet from freezing — it is merely a matter of dress. The 
foot-wear is the more important, for if your mittens are cold you can 
take them off entirely, pull your arms inside your coat and thus keep 
warm, unless, of course, you have some work with the hands to do, 
in which case the hands will have to be exposed, with or without 
mittens as the circumstances dictate. * The Eskimo foot-gear 
consists of a caribou skin sock with the fur turned in, and a caribou 
skin boot with the fur of the sole turned in also and the fur of the 
leg turned either in or out. This makes ideal foot-wear not only in 
the matter of warmth but also in lightness and comfort. On such 
little jaunts as the bear hunt we have just described one may freeze 
chin or cheek or nose, but — barring accident — there is no danger 
to other parts of the body. 



CHAPTER VI 

"l*^ 'T'OVEMBER 9th we arrived at an Eskimo village of five 
^k houses near where the Itkillik River empties into the head 
-^ ^ of the Colville delta. Most of the people belonged to one 
or another of the Colville River tribes, but a few of them hailed 
from across the mountains in the Kuvuk and Noatak valleys and 
elsewhere. Their houses were of the typical inland Eskimo type — 
a dome-shaped frame, of stout willows covered with moss and earth 
to a thickness of six or eight inches, with doors about three feet 
high in the wall, closed with flaps of bearskin or heavy caribou 
hides. Most of these people had sheet-iron stoves which they 
had bought from the Point Barrow Eskimo, about whose trading 
operations we have already spoken, but some of them had open 
fires built on the center of the floor, with holes in the roof which 
served the purposes alternately of a chimney and a window. When 
the fire was going these openings in the roof were kept uncovered, 
and when the fire was extinguished they would be covered with 
transparent membranes made in some cases of the thin skins of 
summer-killed caribou or of fresh-water codfish, after the manner of 
the inland dwellers ; in other cases the windows had been purchased 
from the Point Barrow Eskimo and were made of the intestines of 
bearded seals or walrus according to the custom of the coast. These 
people had made the summer caribou hunt inland and had killed 
a large number of caribou but had made no use whatever of the meat. 
One man, who six weeks before we saw him had killed about one 
hundred and twenty-five caribou, was now living on fish entirely 
and had only a few days' provisions ahead, for the caribou had been 
killed a long way from where he intended to winter and he had 
taken only the skins as he could not haul the meat home. This 
camping ground, which a dozen families had selected for their winter 
home, was at a fairly good fishing place and every one was catching 

80 



IBU. 



A>JL 




Camp on Sea Ice when Open Lead prevented getting Ashore. 




Camp in Woods of Horton River. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 81 

enough to eat for the time being. Still, it was a foregone conclusion 
that they would starve more or less before spring. 

' Although white men do not frequent the Colville district, most of 
these Eskimo were familiar with the ways of white men and all of 
those who were full grown had seen white men once or oftener. But 
many of the children had never seen a white man until they saw me, 
even those who were thirteen or fourteen years of age. Neverthe- 
less they were all Christians and had been for several years. Chris- 
tianity had come to them, spreading up the Kuvuk and Noatak rivers 
from Kotzebue Sound, where it had been started by Moravian 
missionaries. When we came to the village we were invited, accord- 
ing to Eskimo custom, to come in and have something to eat, but con- 
trary to Eskimo custom a wash dish and towel were placed before us, 
and after the water had been blessed with a lengthy prayer we were 
directed to wash our hands and faces. My Eskimo did as they were 
told, and after the washing was over the water in the bowl was again 
blessed before it was spilled out. A lengthy grace was then said over 
the food and a separate grace over the tea which came after. Finally 
at the end of the meal thanks were returned. All of this was of course 
in Eskimo. When the ceremonies were over we were asked whence we 
came ; and when it turned out that my Eskimo had been to Herschel 
Island, where there was known to be a missionary, the local people 
inquired eagerly whether we had brought any new prayers with us. 
Natkusiak, who was at that time scarcely a Christian as yet, although 
since then he has become exceedingly devout, did not know any 
prayers, but Akpek knew a great many. For that reason Natkusiak 
was from the beginning treated with little consideration by the 
community, while Akpek gained their highest respect at once and 
retained it to the end. During our entire stay he was much sought 
after and continually invited around to the various houses to eat and 
to teach the community new prayers. 

What the people especially wanted, they told us, was a new prayer 
for caribou. Three years before, they said, they had obtained an 
excellent prayer for caribou from Kotzebue Sound. It had worked 
so well for the first two years that they had secured plenty of caribou 
through the use of it, not only during the summer season when the 
skins are good for clothing, but also (so efficient was the prayer) 



82 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

during the winter, when under ordinary circumstances they would 
not have been able to get any. But this year the prayer did not seem 
to be working so well. They supposed that white men's prayers, like 
their rifles and other things, no doubt deteriorated with age, and now 
they were anxious to secure a new and more eflicient prayer. Akpek 
told them that he had a very good one, and he at once proceeded to 
teach it to them. I refrained from much comment on all these 
things for I had come to the country to learn rather than to teach, 
but it was difficult for me to restrain myself from pointing out to our 
hosts that unless they had better success with this prayer than 
Akpek himself had had with it during the time he had been in our 
service, they would probably find it a weak reed to lean upon in 
time of emergency. 

The most prominent man of the village, Panniulak, had a large 
package of pictures concerning which he wanted my opinion. Most 
of them had evidently been chpped out of cheap American magazines 
and embraced subjects of all sorts. A considerable number were 
sacred pictures from the Old Masters, but not a few were pictures 
of actors and actresses of all nationalities. Panniulak said to me 
he understood fully that all the pictures where there was a circle 
around the head were pictures of Good Dead Men (which was his 
name for a saint). He knew further that some of those that did 
not wear a halo were Good Dead Men also, and he wanted my opinion 
on certain pictures as to whether they did or did not belong to this 
class. The first picture he inquired about with reference to the saint- 
hood of the original happened to be one of Anna Held, and after her 
came Hall Caine and Joan of Arc. It was an interested circle that 
watched me classify the pictures into two packages, on the basis of 
my idea of the comparative sanctity of the subject of each. 

Although Point Barrow is the nearest place from the Colville 
River at which there is a missionary station, very little of the Colville 
River Christianity comes from there. The reverse is in fact true, 
for Dr. Marsh, the missionary at Point Barrow, has told me that 
each fall when the Point Barrow natives return from the Colville 
they bring with them to Point Barrow a varied assortment of new 
prayers and some of the most astounding beliefs. Most of these 
seem to come across the mountains from Kotzebue Sound, although 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 83 

no doubt they undergo considerable metamorphosis on the way 
over. 

It seems that in Kotzebue Sound the fishing is chiefly done with 
nets. The missionary, in teaching his flock to keep the Sabbath holy, 
has prohibited the use of nets on Sunday, saying nothing about other 
methods of fishing, for he found no others in use. The news of this 
prohibition spread not only northwest along the coast to Point 
Hope and thence to Point Barrow, but also northeast up the Kuvuk 
and Noatak rivers and across the mountains to the Colville, where 
we were trying to lay up a winter store of fish, chiefly by netting but 
also by the use of the hook, which we found a less productive as well 
as a more laborious method. When the commandment reached us it 
appeared in the form : " God has said, you shall not use fish nets on 
Sunday" (the implication being, of course, that if you did you would 
be liable to eternal damnation). Being good Christians and anxious 
to do nothing which could possibly endanger their eternal welfare, 
the Colville River natives accordingly pulled their fish nets out of the 
water on Saturday night, fished with hooks all day Sunday, and put 
their nets back on Monday morning. 

It soon became evident to me that we could not stay long in the 
Colville district on account of the insufficiency of the food supply. 
Two families who were living there had commenced fishing in the 
summer-time and had laid up several tons of fish, but against these 
two families were a dozen others who had been hunting caribou for 
their skins all summer and accordingly had nothing of their own 
to eat. They had, however, according to the communistic ways of 
the country, been gladly received by the provident families and had 
turned to with a will to make short work of their fish piles. Clearly 
this was not a place in which we would do well to tarry long. 
Akpek and his wife, however, wanted to stay, and I was glad they did. 
I wanted a chance to get away from them, for I thought they might 
make some attempt to take care of themselves if they did not have 
Natkusiak and me to look out for them. Accordingly, after staying 
a few days and taking a series of physical measurements of all the 
people and finding out whatever I could about them in that short 
time, Natkusiak and I, with one sled, proceeded west along the coast 
to Point Barrow. We were accompanied by one Colville River family 



84 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

who, like us, felt sure that starvation was not far distant and wanted 
to get away in good time. This family had a considerable supply of 
fish which they gave to those whom we left behind. 

Our journey was without incident until we came to Cape Halkett, 
where Captain Mogg's Olga was frozen in three or four miles offshore. 
Captain Mogg had given me certain things when I was aboard of 
him two months before and we accordingly went out to the ship to 
get them. We expected to find it deserted, but much to our surprise 
we saw fresh tracks of men all around the ship and aboard it we dis- 
covered Leighton, a colored man who had been Captain Mogg's 
first mate. It turned out that when Captain Mogg and his crew had 
left the ship Leighton had considered himself insufficiently clad for 
the journey to Point Barrow and had refused to leave, or rather had 
started off with Captain Mogg and his party, had dropped behind 
gradually, and without Captain Mogg's noting it had returned to the 
ship. Captain Mogg, knowing that there were plenty of provisions 
on board, had not concerned himself further about the man and had 
kept on to Point Barrow, and Leighton had been alone for two 
months. I offered to take him along with us the eighty miles or so 
to Point Barrow where he would find housing and plenty of food 
and company. He preferred to remain with the ship, however, so 
we put in a day with our dog teams hauling him drift-wood from 
the shore to his ship. He had been almost out of fuel when we 
came and would have found it very hard work to haul it without 
the aid of dogs upon the crude hand-sled which he had made. 

From Cape Halkett we proceeded to Smith Bay, where we found 
our cache and our boats in good order. Here we were struck by such 
a terrific southwester that for three days we camped right beside the 
cache, living on short rations within fifty feet of an abundance of 
food, for the wind was blowing so hard that we did not dare to open 
the cache for fear of the lighter articles being carried away by the 
wind, were we to remove the tarpaulin which was lashed down over 
our pile of goods. 

November 28th, after the storm had abated and we had been able 
to get at our stores, we set out from our cache toward Point Barrow, 
and on December 1st we arrived aboard the schooner Challenge, 
Captain Pedersen's ship. She was wintering inside the Point Barrow 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 85 

lagoon about three miles east of Point Barrow proper. The next 
day we proceeded eight miles southwest to Tom Gordon's house and 
the day after that to Cape Smythe village, where we stayed the fol- 
lowing two months as the guests of Mr. Brower. 

Mr. Brower, although he lives far from civilization, lives well. 
The Cape Smythe Whaling & Trading Company have, besides 
numerous storehouses, a commodious and substantial building known 
as the "station," which contains not only their workshops where 
boats, sleds, and other needed articles are made and repaired, but also 
living rooms, of which Mr. Jack Hadley and myself were the sole 
occupants, and a well-equipped kitchen, presided over by a man who 
is the master of his profession. Mr. Morgan had once, he told us 
frequently (and his cooking bore him out), been a chef on one of the 
Fall River steamers. But it was not so much the excellence of the 
table and the comfort of the house that made Cape Smythe attractive, 
but rather the quality of the few white men and women who were 
gathered there together. My time was spent not only pleasantly 
but profitably. I was as yet but a beginner in Eskimo linguistics, 
and received considerable help both from Mr. Brower, who is the one 
whaleman I have ever known who has command of real Eskimo 
speech, and from Dr. Marsh, who speaks the Point Barrow dia- 
lect with readiness. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkesworth, at the govern- 
ment school, also took the greatest interest in my work and put 
their house completely at my disposal. Miss Annie Koodlalook, who 
had acquired perfect command of English in her nine years of resi- 
dence in the United States, still retained a fair knowledge of her 
mother tongue and was therefore able to be of the greatest service to 
me as an assistant in recording folk-lore. 

During these two months, therefore, I wrote down a vocabulary 
of over nine thousand words of the Point Barrow dialect, com- 
piled originally by Dr. Marsh and by Mr. Spriggs, who had been at 
Point Barrow for several years but who had left before I came there. 
This vocabulary was now revised to some extent by myself, with 
the assistance of Dr. Marsh. I also wrote down several hundred 
thousand words of Eskimo folk-lore in English translation. This 
was the last folk-lore I recorded in English, for thereafter my greater 
command of Eskimo enabled me to record directly in the original 



86 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

dialects of the narrators each tale as it was told me ; so that while the 
folk-lore gathered at Point Barrow is of interest only as folk-lore, that 
gathered in the three following years has its linguistic value also. 

The week between Christmas and New Year's Dr. Marsh, in his 
capacity as government physician, made a trip southwest along the 
coast two hundred or so miles to Icy Cape, and I accompanied him 
as his guest about two thirds of the way through to Wainwright 
Inlet, where I spent a few days visiting my old schoolmate, J. E. 
Sinclair, who with his wife was staying at Wainwright Inlet as gov- 
ernment school teacher. When Dr. Marsh came back from Icy Cape 
I returned with him to Point Barrow. This trip is a very simple 
one to make, for Eskimo houses are scattered along the beach every 
twenty miles or so, which makes travel almost as commonplace there 
as it is in the mining districts of Alaska, where one can count on 
reaching a "road-house" every night. 

r The fuel problem has, of recent years, become a difficult one every- 
where in the vicinity of Point Barrow. Up to thirty or so years ago 
the beach was thickly strewn with drift-wood, for the Eskimo used 
only oil for heating, cooking, and lighting purposes, and whenever 
a stick of wood was thrown on the beach it remained there until it 
decayed, which in the cold North is a matter of centuries. The houses 
the people lived in then were of such a type that not much fuel was 
needed in order to keep them warm. They were not underground 
dwellings, but the wooden frames of which they consisted were cov- 
ered with earth to such a thickness that the houses were practically 
cold-proof. These houses were entered through a long alleyway by a 
door that was never closed all winter, and the ventilating hole in the 
roof was always open, so that a current of air circulated through 
the house at all times. For this kind of a house two or three seal- 
oil lamps were abundantly sufficient to keep the temperature uni- 
formly at from 60° to 70° Fahrenheit the twenty-four hours through, 
and the winter through. With the white men of the last half century 
there came to the Arctic the white men's lofty and commodious frame 
dwelHngs. Although these are thoroughly ill-adapted to the country 
they soon became the fashion, and the Eskimo began to build their 
poor hovels in the best imitation they could make of the pretentious 
homes of the foreigners. The ffimsy walls of these new dwellings 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 87 

admitted cold by conduction so that the seal-oil lamps were no longer 
sujQScient for keeping them warm, and even the sheet-iron stoves 
in which drift-wood could be burned had difficulty in keeping them 
at a comfortable temperature. Drift-wood lay in apparently inex- 
haustible windrows along the seashore, but these were the accumula- 
tions of centuries, which the Eskimo, having no use for wood as fuel, 
had allowed to grow. Now, instead of being used as formerly only 
in the construction of the house frames and in the making of sleds 
and implements, the drift-wood was used for fuel in an attempt 
to keep the flimsy new-style houses warm. The result was that the 
drift-wood disappeared so rapidly that in thirty years, by the use of 
stoves, all of it is gone, from Point Hope to thirty miles east of Point 
Barrow. With the increasing scarcity of fuel the ventilation of the 
houses had to be curtailed gradually, so that the modern Eskimo 
house is practically hermetically sealed against fresh air. If there 
is a key-hole in the door you will find it stuffed with chewing gum. 

Not only is the fuel problem serious from an economic point of 
view, it is even more serious as a question of sanitation. Although 
a few of the Eskimo are able to import coal from Seattle, and others 
can get it through difficult labor from the coal mine at Wainwright 
Inlet, the majority have not the means to secure fuel of any sort 
sufficient to keep the new-style houses warm. Instead of the com- 
fortable, well-ventilated, and therefore healthful dwellings of a few 
years ago, we now have hoarfrost-coated and unventilated frame 
houses which look well in photographs to those used to frame houses 
in temperate climates, but which are among the chief causes of the 
high death rate among the Eskimo, through their encouragement 
of pulmonary consumption and other diseases that flourish in filth 
and foul air. 

At the same time that Dr. Marsh and I went southwest to Icy 
Cape, there also went from Point Barrow something like fifteen or 
twenty Eskimo sleds to a native dance at Icy Cape. The white men 
call it a "dance," but really it is the most northeasterly variant of 
the British Columbian "potlatch." Formal invitations had been 
sent by certain men at Icy Cape to certain men at Point Barrow to 
visit them. These invitations had included a statement of what 
sort of present the host expected to receive from his guest on his ar- 



88 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

rival. The messengers from Icy Cape when they returned home 
from Point Barrow carried in turn not only the acceptances or re- 
grets of the people who had been invited, but in case of acceptances 
they carried also an intimation of what sort of present the visitors 
would expect in return for the presents which their hosts demanded. 
I did not see the dance at Icy Cape, but have seen a number of similar 
ones and the procedure is always the same. The visitors camped 
a few miles before reaching the Icy Cape village and a messenger 
was sent ahead in the evening to announce their coming. Several 
young men then came from Icy Cape to the camp of the visitors, and 
the following morning when everything was ready, these and a few 
of the young men from among the visitors ran a race back to Icy 
Cape. Each man who runs a race does it not for himself but as the 
representative of some prominent man who is going to take part in 
the ceremonies. Each racer as he arrives in the village goes to the 
dance-house, where he is met by the wife of his master, or other 
woman of his household, who brings him a warm drink of water and 
something to eat. Later on, the main body of visitors arrive and 
either pitch their own camps or move into the houses of their friends 
in the village. 

That evening the dance begins. A local man will dance first, 
singing songs, recounting his own achievements and telling whatever 
is in his mind to tell. Following this his wife or some one of his 
household hands him the articles which he intends to present to his 
guest. When the presentation is over the guest arises, and in some 
cases dances and sings in the manner of his host, but in others merely 
makes a brief speech and hands over the articles with which he pays 
for the present he has received. Sometimes the initial presents, or 
else the counter presents that pay for them, are not material, but ap- 
parently one of them must be, for I never saw a pledge of super- 
natural assistance paid for in kind. At one of these dances at Point 
Barrow I have seen a man give two cross fox skins to an old "medi- 
cine man" in return for the promise that the shaman would see to 
it that he got two whales the following whaling season. Incidentally 
it may be stated here that the man who gave the two fox skins 
really did get the two whales which were promised in return for 
them, This somewhat strengthened at Point Barrow the general 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 89 

opinion that while Christian prayers are very good in ordinary 
things, the old-fashioned whaling charms are much more effective 
when it comes to catching whales. 

At such a dance or potlatch as this one at Icy Cape the visitors 
usually remain for several days, although the ceremony of exchang- 
ing presents is commonly accomplished within twenty-four hours 
after the arrival of the party. There is a good deal of feasting, sing- 
ing, dancing, and story-telling, and every one has a good time. 

On this trip of ours to Wainwright Inlet and Icy Cape we kept 
getting new sidelights on the forms the new religion is taking in 
northern Alaska. One of the first things that an Eskimo learns 
when he becomes Christian is the importance of refraining from work 
on Sunday. In general the Eskimo's own religion consists mainly 
in a series of prohibitions or taboos, and the prohibitions of Chris- 
tianity are therefore, of all the new teachings, the things he most read- 
ily understands. Under the old religion it used to be believed that 
sickness, famine, and death were caused by such trivial things as 
the breaking of a marrow bone with the wrong kind of hammer, or 
the sewing of deerskin clothing before enough days had elapsed 
from the killing of the last whale or walrus. To avoid breaking 
these taboos meant prosperity and good health, and the gaining 
of all the rewards (or rather the escape from all the penalties) pro- 
vided for by that system of religion. Similarly, now that they know 
about salvation and damnation it seems but logical to them that one 
may be gained and the other avoided by the mere observance of such 
simple prohibitions as that against working on Sunday. 

Dr. Marsh, who is a man of university education and of broad 
views in religious matters, often tried to explain to his congregation 
at Point Barrow that while the keeping of the Sabbath was in general 
an estimable thing, there were certain circumstances under which 
it was not called for, nor even desirable. To try to make clear this 
idea he preached again and again from the text of how Our Lord 
gathered the ears of corn on the Sabbath, but failed completely in 
getting them to see the matter from his point of view. I suggested 
to Dr. Marsh, therefore, that possibly his own example would do 
more good than his preaching in showing the Eskimo how Sunday 
might safely be treated. Accordingly, in order to give the people 



90 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

an example, we traveled on two occasions upon Sunday. But the 
example availed nothing except further to lose Dr. Marsh his standing 
in the community. I heard many comments, most of which were 
to the effect that if Dr. Marsh was willing to endanger his temporal 
and eternal welfare, they nevertheless were not. They knew of old 
how dangerous it was to break taboos ; they could see now that 
undoubtedly many of the past misfortunes and accidents of their peo- 
ple were no doubt due to the fact that they had broken the Sabbath 
taboo before they knew of its existence. Now that they knew it, no 
man who took thought of his own interests or those of the community 
would break the taboo. Possibly Dr. Marsh and I had some charm 
by which we could evade the effect of our transgression, but the pun- 
ishment would surely fall on some one. 

It has been true in Greenland, and wherever Christianity has long 
had root among the Eskimo, that it has taken upon itself develop- 
ments such as those just indicated, which are strange to our European 
ideas, and which the European missionaries are entirely powerless 
to check. So it was with Dr. Marsh at Point Barrow. He tried to 
combat certain doctrines, which to his mind were narrow-minded 
and which were certainly of local growth, with the result that his 
own congregation judged him a man who was opposed to the Kingdom 
of God and one whom they did not desire to have as a missionary. 
The case is interesting, and although the ending of it does not fall at 
this point of our narrative chronologically, it may be as well to take 
it up here, seeing that I, in a measure, deserve the blame for urging 
Dr. Marsh into a conflict in which I might have known he was sure 
to be defeated. 

Some of Dr. Marsh's more serious difficulties with his flock grew 
out of matters pertaining to whaling. The whaling season at Point 
Barrow in the spring is about six weeks long, beginning generally 
the first of May. At that time northeasterly winds usually blow, 
with the result that a lead opens up, commonly somewhere between a 
half and five miles offshore. This lead may be anything from a few 
yards to several hundred yards in width, and extends southwest 
along the coast to Bering Straits, forming a path of open water along 
which the whales come in the spring on their annual migration from 
the Pacific to the Beaufort Sea. Whether the land-floe be half a 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 91 

mile or five miles wide, the whalemen must go to the outer edge of 
it with their boats and whaling gear and wait there for the coming 
of the whales. There is no regularity about the migration of the 
animals, and often at the height of the whaling season the crews 
may be encamped for a week at a time without seeing any ; and then, 
all in one day, scores of whales may come along and pass on to the 
eastward. This day of opportunity is, according to our modern way 
of thinking, as likely as not to be a Sunday. When the Eskimo 
learned that God had forbidden work upon the Sabbath they took 
the point of view that it does not profit a man that he gain the whole 
world if he lose his own soul, and although the catching of whales was 
the one thing in the world which all of them most desired, neverthe- 
less they agreed that the loss of one's soul was too great a price to 
pay for even a bow-head whale. Accordingly they would commence 
on Saturday afternoon to pull back their boats from the edge of the 
ice and get everything ready for the Sabbath observance. Satur- 
day evening the men themselves would abandon temporarily their 
boats and gear, on the outer edge of the shore ice, to go ashore and 
remain there all day Sunday. It usually took them half of Monday 
to get everything ready for work again. In this manner they lost 
two days out of every seven from a harvest season of only six weeks 
in the year, j 

It was in vain that Dr. Marsh expostulated with the people, and 
pointed out that not only were they losing the chance of getting whales 
but that they also ran a serious risk of losing their boats and whaling 
gear in case a strong northeaster should happen to blow up while 
they were ashore. This would carry all of their belongings out to 
sea in the break-up of the ice that was sure to occur under a strong 
offshore wind. "But can't you see to it," they asked him, "that 
the whales do not come on Sunday and that a northeaster does not 
blow too hard while we are away from our boats ? God controls the 
winds and the movements of the whales ; can't you ask Him to have 
the whales come on week days only, and can't you ask Him to keep our 
boats and gear safe?" Dr. Marsh explained to them that, accord- 
ing to his view, the Lord governed the earth by certain laws with the 
operation of which he was not likely to interfere even in response to 
the most heartfelt prayers. He explained further in the most mod- 



92 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

ern way the subjective efficacy of prayer and how, if they prayed 
rightly and sincerely, a balm would descend upon their souls and 
make them stronger and better men. But they did not want a balm 
— they wanted a change of wind, and they began to mutter among 
themselves that this was a fine sort of missionary to have, who was 
unable to control the winds and help them in whaling. They re- 
minded themselves how their own medicine men had been able not 
only to control the comings and goings of the whales, but had even 
been able to make the whales willing to be killed. They also in- 
quired from their countryn\en in other districts, who reported that 
the missionaries whom they had assured them that, if they prayed 
to God in the right way, He would do for them whatever they asked 
Him. That was the kind of missionary to have, and why could not 
they, too, have such a missionary ? And so they formulated charges, 
which were written down by the scholars among them and forwarded 
to the Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, in New 
York. There were a good many counts in the charges, but the ones 
of the greatest importance to the Eskimo mind were these : that Dr. 
Marsh encourages Sabbath-breaking ; that Dr. Marsh teaches that 
prayers are of no avail ; and that Dr. Marsh encourages immodesty 
by taking off his coat in the Eskimo houses. 

With reference to the last charge it may be said that it was the 
Eskimo custom for men and women, whenever they entered their 
superheated dwellings, to take off their coats and sit naked to the 
waist, while children were commonly allowed to go entirely naked 
up to the age of six years. The fact that the human form is essen- 
tially vile and must be kept from sight was not known to the primitive 
Eskimo, but was accepted unquestioningly by them, along with the 
other truths of Christianity, so soon as they heard of it. 

When a missionary or any one connected with the church tells 
the Eskimo anything, they always take it as coming directly from 
God, or else as a downright falsehood. It had been so with the 
shamans before the missionaries — the good and honorable ones 
spoke the simple truth as they received it from the spirits ; the bad 
shamans were merely liars, who pretended to represent the spirits 
but did not. The missionary, who in the mind of the Eskimo is a 
new and in certain ways a superior kind of shaman, does not, there- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 93 

fore, speak as a private individual ; he is in their eyes but the mouth- 
piece of the Lord. When some missionary somewhere in Alaska had 
said that sitting stripped to the waist was wrong, the Eskimo had 
understood it as one of the things which if done would lead to dam- 
nation. When Dr. Marsh had failed to fall in with this view, but on 
the other hand considered taking off his coat the only sensible thing 
to do in the overheated houses, they believed him in error either 
through malice or lack of knowledge of the taboo in question, and 
considered he was encouraging a practice that endangered the eternal 
welfare of those who might follow it. 

I have no information at hand to indicate why the Board of Home 
Missions in New York dismissed Dr. Marsh from his post at Point 
Barrow, as they eventually did the summer of 1912. But I do know 
why his congregation thought him dismissed. The Eskimo at Point 
Barrow consider that it was done on the basis of the complaints 
which they themselves had sent to the Mission Board, the vital points 
of which, to their minds, are the three cited above ; and I do know 
that they expressed great satisfaction in securing a missionary, in 
1912, who believed with them that prayers would have a material 
and immediate answer of the sort they desired. 

But while the Point Barrow Eskimo rejoiced that they were getting 
a missionary with more orthodox views and whose influence with the 
Lord was more immediate and effective than that of Dr. Marsh, they 
also realized their loss in being compelled, in the future, to go without 
his constant medical care as a doctor. There was many a chronic 
invalid at Point Barrow whom I saw him visit every day for months 
on end, and many a woman whose life he had saved at childbirth. 
Especially when the day of his leaving had come, when they saw their 
minister's family packing up their things in preparation for departure, 
this aspect of the case began to strike the people more forcibly, and 
on that day (when I was about to take the revenue cutter at Point 
Barrow in 1912) a number of them came to me saying that they were 
the ones who had signed the complaint against Dr. Marsh and that 
they were now sorry they had done it. They wanted me to inter- 
cede with the captain of the revenue cutter, whom they supposed 
all-powerful, to get him to permit Dr. Marsh to stay after all. Of 
course I had to tell them that the revenue cutter had nothing to do 



94 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

with it — that Dr. Marsh was going, never to return, and that they 
would now have to depend upon the efficacy of prayer for the cure 
of their ailments as well as for the success of their whaling. 

After Dr. Marsh's return and mine from our journey southwest, 
I remained at Cape Smythe another six weeks, chiefly engaged in 
the recording of folk-lore. On March 6th Natkusiak and I finally 
set out eastward hoping to connect with Dr. Anderson ; for I con- 
sidered he would by now have had plenty time to get his mountain 
sheep and caribou specimens in the Endicott Mountains south of 
Barter Island and would probably have returned to the coast where 
I could find him, and where we could begin to get ready for our east- 
ward journey of the coming summer. The first lap of the journey 
was a short one, for we went only twelve miles to Captain Pedersen's 
Challenge. Mr. and Mrs. Hawkesworth and Miss Koodlalook ac- 
companied us that far with their own dog team, but returned the same 
evening. The Challenge was lying only about three miles east of the 
Point Barrow village, and I stayed there a day with the idea of pur- 
chasing some dog feed from the Eskimo. Captain Pedersen and I 
went to the village with my sled, and as he had plenty of trade goods 
on the ship he expected to buy the dog meat for me, but it turned 
out that I could get all I wanted for nothing. Gratitude for ser- 
vices or gifts is practically unknown among the younger generation 
of the Alaskan Eskimo, but it was not so formerly, and, as I now found 
out, there are a few men still left at Point Barrow whose ideas in such 
matters are still those of their ancestors. 

During the preceding September, when Storkerson and I were on 
our way east with our two boats loaded with provisions, we had met 
the boat of the Point Barrow Eskimo, Akowak, on one of the barren 
sandspits where they were detained by a head wind and were out of 
provisions, and I had given them a sack of flour and a few other 
things. When Akowak now learned that I was wanting seal meat 
for my dogs he at once sent me word that he would see to it that I 
got as much for nothing as I cared to haul. He himself gave me a 
whole seal, and several other people in the village sent me presents 
of meat, saying that certain relatives of theirs had been hungry in 
Akowak's boat at the time I gave them the flour and that they also 
wanted to show their appreciation. Such incidents are, in my ex- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 95 

perience, typical only of the men of the older generation, whose 
characters were thoroughly formed under the system of their own 
people before civilization had wrought the distressing changes which 
are now everywhere apparent. In this my experience does not differ 
from that of any white man whom I know whose experience with the 
Eskimo is sufficient to entitle him to an opinion. 

On March 10th we finally left the Challenge, going east, and on 
March 13th we reached the Eskimo houses at the fishing lake near the 
southeast corner of Smith Bay. Here we were storm-bound for four 
days, together with an Eskimo family who were going in a different 
direction and who had arrived here a day or two before us. This 
couple brought to mind a story which I must now go back a few 
weeks to narrate. 

Early one Saturday afternoon about Christmas time a man and 
his wife arrived at Cape Smythe with a few caribou skins to sell. 
The word that they had skins for sale and sinew passed around quickly, 
and I heard of it the same day because my Eskimo, Natkusiak, came 
and asked me whether I wanted to buy any of the skins. The couple 
reported that they had been spending the autumn on the upper 
Colville River, that game had become scarce there, and that they had 
struck across country, a distance of perhaps two hundred miles, toward 
Cape Smythe. This was the substance of all they told until about 
midnight of the day of their arrival, when they added the further 
detail that on the Colville with them had been another Eskimo family, 
the woman of which was the sister of the man who had arrived at 
Cape Smythe. The two families with their two dog-sleds had left 
the Colville together, but the man now at Cape Smythe had had his 
sled loaded with caribou meat and the other family had none. With 
great magnanimity the man who had the meat fed his sister and her 
husband, but would not give their dogs anything to eat, although he 
fed his own dogs well. The result was that the dogs of the second 
couple got weak with hunger and finally froze to death. When the 
dogs were all dead the second family were no longer able to keep up, 
and so were left behind about forty miles east of Cape Smythe. 

When the Cape Smythe people heard this story they immediately 
set about organizing a search party and were about to start off when 
somebody pointed out that it was now already Sunday (for Sunday, 



96 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

according to Cape Smythe opinion, begins at twelve o'clock Saturday 
night) . When those about to start on the search for the abandoned 
couple realized it was Sunday they saw at once that nothing could 
be done, for no work must be done on the Sabbath, and especially 
no journey must be started on the Sabbath day. 

Curiously enough, although all the white men at Cape Smythe 
had heard at noon on Saturday the story of the arrival of the couple 
with the skins to sell, none of us happened to hear until late Sunday 
evening the story of the other couple who had been left to starve 
thirty or forty miles to the east of us. We found out later that the 
case had been the subject of continuous conversation among the 
Eskimo for the last twenty-four hours, but for some strange reason 
none of us happened to hear of it. Dr. Marsh conducted his Sunday 
evening service that night in the ordinary way, but when it was over 
he was surprised to find that the people, instead of going home at 
once as they commonly did on Sunday nights, all lingered about the 
church. When he asked them what they were waiting for they told 
him they were waiting for Sunday to be over, so they could start out 
to the rescue of a man and his wife who were starving and probably 
freezing to death. As soon as Dr. Marsh realized the facts he did 
everything possible to get the search party started, but it was already 
after midnight and the Sabbath well over when they finally got off. 

In following the trail eastward they found evidences to show that 
the couple who had arrived at Cape Smythe had been traveling with 
great speed, taking turns sitting on the sled while the other ran ahead 
of the dogs. In other words, had they so desired they could very 
easily have brought home the other couple instead of abandoning 
them, for both they and their dogs had evidently been in full strength. 

A blizzard came up on Monday morning before the searching 
party had got far enough east to discover the place where the couple 
had been abandoned. The Sunday which they had wasted in 
inactivity had been a day of excellent weather, but that was all 
changed now, for the snow was drifting so thick that the searchers 
were unable to find the abandoned couple and returned empty-handed 
on the second day. But the same morning on which the searchers 
returned empty-handed to Cape Smythe, Mr. Thomas Gordon, who 
lives three miles north of the Cape, heard a faint noise outside his 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 97 

door. He took it for the noise made by the scratching of a dog, 
but a few minutes later when the door was accidentally opened by 
some member of the household they found outside it an unconscious 
man. When the warmth of the house had restored him it turned 
out that he was the man of the couple who had been abandoned. 
He had barely had the strength to drag himself to Mr. Gordon's 
house and had collapsed two or three times within the last two 
hundred or three hundred yards before reaching it. Mr. Gordon 
at once sent out a search party, who followed the man's trail through 
the snow and found his wife, with her hands and feet slightly frozen, 
in a fireless camp a few miles to the east. 

During the next few weeks I often saw the abandoned man 
and his wife, but the couple who abandoned them I now met here 
in Smith Bay for the first time. When we took our meal together 
on the first evening I noticed that this man was the one who took 
it upon himself to say grace, and as the circumstance interested me 
I inquired carefully of him about his religious views and how long he 
had been a Christian. He had been a Christian for about ten years, 
he said, and knew more prayers than any other Eskimo and was 
very particular not to break any of the commandments of the Lord. 
For many years he had done no work on Sunday ; for many j^ears he 
had never eaten a meal without saying grace; and in every other 
way he lived according to the law as he understood it. I asked 
him whether he had never heard that such things as leaving his 
sister to starve to death were also against the law of the Lord. He 
replied that he never had heard anything about that. His Chris- 
tianity, he told me with evident regret, might not be the best and 
most up-to-date kind, for he had never himself had the chance to 
get any first-hand from a missionary. He had learned his Christian- 
ity entirely from the converted Eskimo of the Kuvuk River, who, 
he said, might not be well informed about all the prohibitions neces- 
sary for salvation. 

It may be worth a passing note that the abandoned family were 
also Christians. During the several weeks that they were being 
nursed back to health by Mr. and Mrs. Gordon they noticed Mr. 
Gordon never said grace at meals, and they many times expressed 
to my Eskimo companion, Natkusiak, their strong abhorrence of 



98 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

their host's irreverent ways. After they finally left his house and 
began to hve with some Eskimo relatives in the Cape Smythe village 
I questioned them as to what they thought of Mr. Gordon and got 
some frank criticisms, but no expression of gratitude. The follow- 
ing spring when Mr. Gordon needed some help in whaling he asked 
this man to work for him, but he preferred to work for some one 
else at the same salary offered by Mr. Gordon. 

We were not in any hurry to leave this Smith Bay fishing place, 
for I was learning many interesting things from the Colville River 
Eskimo with whom we were camping, so it was not until March 
17th that we finally started. As Leighton had been removed some 
time before from the Olga, there was no one for us to visit at 
Cape Halkett, and neither did we care to go out of our way in the 
Colville delta to look for our former employee, Akpek, and the rest 
of the people whom we had left there in the autumn, for we thought 
they had probably moved to other parts before now ; and if they were 
there we feared they might be so short of food that visitors would 
not be particularly welcome. We therefore took the sea route 
outside the Colville delta for Oliktok, where we had cached the 
meat of the eight caribou killed in October. We found that Akpek 
had been there ahead of us, and had eaten up most of the meat. 
I had hired him in the fall with the idea that he would hunt for me 
and that his wife would sew me clothing ; but it turned out that she 
made for me, all together, one boot ; and as for Akpek, he was present 
at the killing of a single caribou while he participated in the eating 
of more than a dozen that Natkusiak and I had killed. Both in 
the fall, while we had him with us, and later on in the spring after I 
allowed him to join us again, we had to look after him and his wife 
continually. I was paying Ilavinirk and his wife two hundred 
dollars a year, besides furnishing them with tobacco, ammunition, 
and other necessities, and Akpek was to have received the same. 
When I finally severed connections with the family after looking out 
for them for several months, he felt, and so did all the Eskimo of the 
country, that I owed him two hundred dollars for having had the 
privilege of looking after him for half a year; and if ever I go 
back to the Arctic I expect to find that no one has forgotten how I 
cheated him out of half his wages, for I did give him about one 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 99 

hundred dollars' worth of gear to pay for the entertainment of his 
company. Originally the Eskimo had among themselves nothing 
corresponding to the institution of service, and although in Arctic 
Alaska they are now frequently hired by white men, they do not 
seem to grasp the idea that the pay they get is a return for the work 
they do. The industrious ones you hire remain industrious, the 
lazy ones continue lazy, but neither the industrious nor the lazy 
seem to have any idea that the lazy deserve less pay than the most 
skillful and tireless workers. 

Although we saw recent traces of Akpek at Oliktok he had 
left there before we arrived. Two days later, near the mouth of the 
Kuparuk River, we saw several caribou tracks and of a sudden noticed 
three dark objects moving ahead of us. We were badly in want of 
meat and both of us eagerly began to study them through our field 
glasses. Much to our satisfaction we were able to decide that these 
were two large caribou and a fawn. We took our dogs ashore and 
tied them up to a log, seized our rifles and ran ahead, only to find 
when we rounded the next point that our two big caribou had changed 
into two sleds under sail, for it was blowing steadily from the east, 
which gave them a fair wind. The fawn had become a man running 
ahead of the dog teams. This party proved to consist of Kunaluk, 
who had accompanied Storkerson and me in the fall, and with him 
were his family, another man, and Akpek's wife. They informed 
us that they came from the cache just east of the Kuparuk River, 
where we had stored the meat of three caribou, shot in October. 
They had just finished eating the last remnant of our meat and were 
now without food, but were on their way up the Kuparuk River 
to where they expected Akpek and some other Eskimo would be 
catching fish in considerable numbers. They inquired how much 
meat there was left in our cache at Oliktok. After I had truth- 
fully answered that there was still considerable, they did not seem 
so keen about continuing up the Kuparuk. They said they were 
going up the river to Akpek's camp, but they said it with far less 
conviction than they had shown before, and from that time on I had 
forebodings about the Oliktok cache which were destined to prove 
themselves justified about a month later. We gave the party about 
a day's rations of food and advised them strongly to proceed up the 



100 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Kuparuk River, suggesting that we ourselves might sometime find 
use for our own meat at Oliktok if they did not eat it up. 

Three days after parting with these Eskimo we arrived at 
Flaxman Island to find that Dr. Anderson had not yet returned 
from the mountains. We stayed for a day or two, however, to visit 
with Captain Wolki of the Rosie H. and with Storkerson. Wlien 
we were on the point of setting out in search of Anderson, a sled 
arrived with the news that he was due to follow in the course of a 
day or two. According to report he had been successful in his winter 
hunt and he and his party had returned to the coast, partly for 
want of tobacco, and partly also because the time had come which 
was set by him and me for a meeting at Flaxman Island. 

For several days after this I waited impatiently for Anderson 
to appear and finally set out to look for him. But we did not 
have to go far, for we met him about eighteen miles east of Flax- 
man Island. He had been delayed partly by heavy going, for he 
was hauling big loads of mountain sheep and caribou heads and 
skins, and partly also by the hospitality of Ned Arey, who for the 
time being was living at Barter Island. 



CHAPTER VII 

A PRIL 16th we left Flaxman Island again, bound this time for 
/-\ Point Barrow. Dr. Anderson had some work to do at 
— ^ Flaxman Island, and I expected to make a quick trip to 
Point Barrow and return thence to Smith Bay, by which time Ander- 
son, who would leave Flaxman Island about a week after us, would be 
able to reach Smith Bay also and meet us there. In my party this 
time were Ilavinirk and his family. Storkerson also accompanied us, 
bound for Point Barrow where he intended to try his luck at whaling. 
We now had daylight the twenty-four hours through, and at first 
we traveled at night with the idea that the nights were cooler than 
the days and therefore better suited for travel, and the days better 
adapted for comfortable camping. We found the nights were too 
cool, however, — as low as — 35° in some cases; not that this inter- 
fered at all with our physical comfort, but hauling sleds is much 
easier in warm weather than in cold, for the friction of the sled run- 
ners against the snow increases as the temperature falls, until at 
— 50° F. it is almost as if one were sledging on sand. After travel- 
ing for two nights and finding the sleds dragged we decided to 
travel only daytimes thereafter. At noon the bright sun brought 
the mercury up to fifteen or even twenty degrees above zero, at 
which temperatures the sled runners glide so easily over the snow 
that although the dogs incline to laziness in warm weather, this is 
more than compensated for by the improved going. 

On April 22d we reached our meat cache at Oliktok, to find, as 
we had feared, that Kunaluk's party and Akpek's had been there 
more than two weeks ahead of us. They had gone at the matter 
energetically and between them and their dogs they had, about 
four days before we arrived, so nearly finished our provisions that they 
were able to load the rest on their sleds and carry it off with them. 
Akpek had stayed behind, however, and it was only Kunaluk and 
his son-in-law with their two sleds who were concerned in the direct 

101 



102 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

theft of our provisions, for in that country one does not consider 
it a theft to merely camp beside a food cache and eat it up. 

Besides the meat there had been cached here fifty pounds of 
rice which belonged to Kunaluk. In the fall I had tried to buy 
this sack of rice from Mr. Leffingwell, but he felt that he had to give 
some white men's provisions to poor Kunaluk, who was working 
for him. I had told Leffingwell that Kunaluk would not appreciate 
the rice, but of this he had remained unconvinced. I now felt in a 
measure repaid for the loss of my caribou meat through learning, 
from Akpek, that Kunaluk had fed the entire fifty pounds of rice to 
his dogs while he himself and his family lived on my deer meat, 
which showed precisely how much he thought of the rice that would 
have been nearly priceless to us. I could now, when I saw him next, 
tell Leffingwell exactly how much "poor Kunaluk," who "must have 
some white men's food for a delicacy now and then," valued the 
delicacy when he had it. 

On our journey west along the coast this time we found fewer 
traces of caribou than ever before and only old ones at that, although 
Dr. Anderson and Natkusiak, when they came along two weeks 
later, were able to secure three cow caribou near Oliktok. 

When I found Akpek at Oliktok I saw at once that I would have 
to do something for him, for he was so evidently helpless that to 
abandon him would have been tantamount to murder. I had 
tried to shirk the responsibility of looking after him earlier in the 
winter by leaving him with his relatives on the Colville, but now 
I saw the only thing to do was to take him to Point Barrow 
where the laziest and most improvident Eskimo can make a good 
living. He was not feeling very well and his wife was also sick 
(or else she played sick very successfully, for she was so exceedingly 
lazy that one always suspected her motives whenever she had some 
excuse for not working). But whether she was sick or not we treated 
her as if she were, and hauled her on our sleds three fourths of the 
time, while Akpek himself was on the sled about half the time, 
a thing which delayed us considerably, especially as our dogs were 
poorly fed and consequently not pulling very hard. 

When we finally got to Smith Bay Akpek's troubles were aug- 
mented by a severe case of snow-blindness, so we left him and his 




A Dead Caribou. 




Natkusiak shooting a Sleeping Seal. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 103 

family behind at our food cache, telhng them they might stay as long 
as they liked, and then moved on the fifty or so miles to Point Bar- 
row. We could leave them without fear that they would stay to eat 
all our provision store, for although there were plenty of white 
men's provisions at our cache there was no fresh meat to be had in 
Smith Bay, and it does not take an Eskimo long to get thoroughly 
tired of white men's food. They were sure therefore to follow us 
as soon as they could to Point Barrow. 

April 30th we arrived at Point Barrow to find whaling in full 
progress. Captain Pedersen was off on the ice and his schooner, 
the Challenge, was deserted except for the colored steward who 
remained on board as caretaker. A half mile south of the Chal- 
lenge in the same lagoon was another schooner, the Ivy, owned 
by Captain Charles Klinkenberg, to whale with whom Storkerson 
had come to Point Barrow. Accordingly Storkerson and I parted 
company there, while I proceeded south to Cape Smythe, to find 
of course that all the white men were five miles or so away on 
the sea ice engaged in whaling. Under ordinary circumstances 
Mr. Brower's house at Point Barrow has been my home whenever 
I have been there, but it was deserted now, and so I accepted the 
kind invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Hawkesworth to stay with them 
at the government school the few days we should remain at Cape 
Smythe. 

On our arrival at Cape Smythe we heard distressing news. The 
night before we came, there died, under tragic circumstances, one 
of the most promising young Eskimo women of the village. But 
this was almost forgotten by every one except her most 
immediate relatives in the suspense caused by an accident of a few 
days before. A strong northeasterly wind had suddenly sprung up. 
The whalemen, both Eskimo and white, were five miles from shore 
on the edge of the floe and they, together with about four miles 
of ice, were all carried out to sea, for the ice broke off no more 
than a mile from the beach. Most of the boats had immediately 
realized their danger, although it was by no means self-evident, 
for it is difiicult to tell about so huge a mass of ice whether it is 
in motion or not, if it floats oif in one body. Most of the boats had 
immediately been loaded on the sleds, hauled landward across the 



104 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

four miles of ice, and launched on the landward side before the lead 
between the now detached ice mass and the land had become too 
wide for safe crossing. Two of the boats, however, did not come to 
land, and both of these belonged to Mr. Brower's party ; one of them 
was commanded by an EngHshman, Jack Hadley, the other by an 
Eskimo ; the crews of both were entirely Eskimo. By morning, after 
a few hours of the strong northeasterly wind, all the ice had been 
driven out of sight, and it was evident that in that state of weather 
it would be impossible for Mr. Hadley' s boats to reach land against 
the wind. Although the wind blew from the northeast the ocean 
currents along the shore flowed strongly from the southwest, so that 
the presumption was that the boats had been carried in a direction 
that was the resultant of these two forces, or in other words, in a 
northwesterly direction, away from all land. 

As the days lengthened into weeks hope for the return of the 
boats grew less and less, until by May 16th when we left Cape Smythe 
Mr. Brower had nearly given up all hope and the Eskimo were 
mourning their relatives for lost. It was several months after this 
that we heard the outcome, which was not tragic after all, and 
which brought out incidentally the interesting scientific fact that the 
ocean currents which are so steadily and constantly from the south- 
west at Point Barrow are merely local within a few miles offshore. 

When the storm that drove the ice away struck them, Mr. Had- 
ley and his two boats' crews were just engaged in cutting in a large 
whale. They realized their danger no less than did the other boats, 
but they did not want to lose the $10,000 worth of whalebone which 
they had just secured. By the time the bone was all safe in the boat 
it was too late to attempt getting to shore against the wind, and they 
merely had to bide their time until a change of wind should make 
the attempt feasible. They thought, exactly as we did on shore, 
that the current was sweeping them steadily to the northwest, so 
they expected to be carried far out beyond all land. They had no 
sextant or similar instrument with them and were therefore unable 
to determine their position even when the sun shone brightly, and so, 
reasoning on the basis of all they knew, they steered southeast from 
ice cake to ice cake, expecting that if they ever saw land again it 
would be at Point Barrow, whence they had been carried away. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 105 

The party had some ammunition and a rifle and were able to kill 
both seals and polar bears, but were nevertheless on short rations 
for several days ; but what they suffered from most, and especially 
the Eskimo, was the want of tobacco, for all of them were tobacco 
users, the Eskimo from infancy. When they finally saw land, 
much to the surprise of all of them it turned out to be Cape Lis- 
burne, about four hundred miles southwest of where they expected 
to be. In other words, when the offshore wind drove the floe on 
which they were out to sea, they were carried out of the northeasterly 
current into a southwesterly one, which had, in the course of two 
weeks, carried them something like four hundred miles to the south- 
west. As soon as they recognized the land everything was simple, 
for they knew where the Eskimo villages were and their journey 
back to Point Barrow was merely a matter of a few days of rowing 
and sailing. 

Shortly before our arrival the spring mail had come, bringing 
letters from Seattle dated as late as January 24th. The news we 
got from San Francisco was discouraging news for every one. 
The price of whalebone, it was said, had fallen, and no whaling 
vessels were coming up the following season. This meant finan- 
cial loss and inconvenience to all those engaged in the whaling 
business, and affected my plans in so far that we were now evidently 
compelled to rely upon our own resources entirely on going east 
along the coast, whereas in an ordinary whaling season we might 
have boarded a whaling vessel at Point Barrow to be carried by her 
as far east as Cape Bathurst. There was nothing for it then but to 
commence at once moving our gear east. 

The sloop which Mr. Gordon had so kindly lent us the fall before 
was in the ice in Smith Bay, in considerable danger of being broken 
up if stormy weather should accompany the spring thaws. One 
had to take those risks, however, and I engaged an Eskimo to go 
down and look after the sloop, so far as he could, during the break-up 
of the ice and to bring her back to Mr. Gordon at Point Barrow 
as soon as there was open water. Our whale-boat also had to be 
disposed of. We could not possibly afford to wait in Smith Bay until 
a thaw should enable us to sail her out, and she was far too heavy 
for hauling on a sled. The Point Barrow Eskimo, however, value 



106 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

whale-boats very highly, so I took the expedient of trading her 
off for an Eskimo skin-boat, which was really much more service- 
able to us. One of these skin-boats will carry a ton and a half 
of freight in calm weather, which is more than a whale-boat will 
carry, and yet they are so light that two men can carry them 
overland and they can conveniently be hauled on dog sleds any dis- 
tance. Besides this, the skin-boats (which are made of the hides of 
six bearded seals, sewed together and stretched over a frame of 
drift-wood) are much stronger and less liable to accident than the 
expensive cedar-wood whale-boats, and being flat bottomed they go 
in shallower water and can be beached anywhere, even in fairly rough 
surf, in the manner of a dory. They are also the best craft known 
to me for the navigation of shallow rivers. Their one defect is 
that you have to dry them every few days to prevent the skin from 
rotting. This does not necessitate much delay in fine weather, for 
it merely means unloading the boat and propping it up on edge on 
the beach alongside the camp overnight ; but in damp or rainy weather 
it becomes almost impossible to dry the boats and they will then go 
to pieces in one season, whereas a boat properly taken care of and 
dried every few days will last three or four seasons. 

It was evidently going to be slow work to haul eastward the large 
outfit we had at Smith Bay. The outfit was in fact much larger 
than I approved of theoretically, but having it I lacked the moral 
courage for throwing it away. One of our troubles was evidently 
going to be to secure meat for the dogs to enable us to haul, without 
consuming it too fast, the flour and other white men's food in our 
cache. I accordingly borrowed from Dr. Marsh his excellent team 
of dogs, and with them and my own dogs hauled to Smith Bay about 
a thousand pounds of whale meat of which Mr. Brower had made me 
a present from one of the whales he had just killed. This took Ila- 
vinirk and me five days, and it was not until May 16th that we 
finally left Point Barrow for good, hauling our new skin-boat along 
with us. 

In traveling eastward we soon found that although the skin- 
boat is light it is so big and takes on so much wind that traveling with 
it on top of the sled is impracticable in windy weather. It was like 
towing against the wind a square-rigged ship with all sails set. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 107 

This did not cause serious delays, however, as we had to ''double- 
trip" all of our hauling. When it was too windy to haul the boat 
we could usually occupy our time in sledging forward our provisions 
and gear. 

Dr. Anderson had, according to our expectations, reached our 
cache on Smith Bay a few days before we got there with the skin-boat 
from Point Barrow, and had already hauled everything that belonged 
to us east beyond Pitt Point, where we overtook him May 25th. 

The story of our journey eastward for the next two or three weeks 
is merely a story of hard labor and heavy freighting. We would 
move our camp and three sled-loads of stuff ahead about eight or 
ten miles and pitch camp ; then it would take us two extra trips to 
haul the rest of the gear up to the camp ; then we would move camp 
ahead another ten miles and in two more days we would haul the 
freight up to it again. This meant slow travel. Had I possessed 
the moral courage to throw away our flour and other provisions and 
to depend entirely on the country for food, we should have made 
treble speed and have been much better off in the end. To depend 
on the country had been our plan from the first; I now excused to 
myself the deviation from that plan by saying it had never been our 
intention to follow it in Alaska, where white men, had nearly exter- 
minated the game upon which we counted on living in the more easterly 
districts, for which our programme was originally made out. In the 
spring season we could have lived on the country even in Alaska, 
however, as we later had occasion to prove (in May, 1912). 

By the end of May signs of the coming of spring began to multi- 
ply. The snow in large patches was gone from the land, geese and 
ducks had come, and there was water in places on the sea ice. Dr. 
Anderson and his party had, the fall before, abandoned our second 
whale-boat and considerable gear with it at Barter Island, two hun- 
dred miles east of Cape Halkett, where we now were (May 30th). 
Somebody would have to be at Barter Island to look after the boat 
and gear during the spring thaws and we therefore decided to send 
Ilavinirk ahead. He left us the morning of May 30th and, as we 
learned later, reached Barter Island safely in about two weeks, 
although this was the very latest time for safe travel, as the rivers 
were already opening and the ice was rapidly breaking up. 



108 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

After Ilavinirk left us, things moved even more slowly than f 
before. We had had three sleds and three dog teams and now we 
had only two. We could see at once that it would be impossible for 
us to cross the Colville River on the ice, and the best we could hope' 
for was to reach the western edge of the delta so as to be ready to 
launch our boat and cross it by the first open water. But even in 
this we had no success. The water and slush became too deep on 
the sea ice. Further moving of heavy loads became impracticable 
June 12th, when we were as yet some fifteen miles west of the most 
western mouth of the Colville. This was hard luck, for it would 
have been very desirable to cross the Colville while as yet it only 
(and not the sea off its mouth) was open, for the solid ice to seaward 
would have sheltered us from the on-shore winds and dangerous 
breakers which make navigation of river deltas the terror of boat- 
men in all parts of the world. However, there was nothing for it 
but to wait until the ice melted away and to hunt as energetically as 
possible meantime, to keep our stores of food up to the level. 

It was at this time that I first became familiar with the psychology 
of seals. Arctic explorers of some experience have said in print 
that a white man may learn to hunt caribou as well as an Eskimo, 
but no white man can ever learn to hunt seals successfully on top of 
the Arctic spring ice. This is so far from being true in my experience 
that I should say it is much easier to stalk seals than it is to stalk 
caribou. All you have to know is one or two elementary facts about 
the seal's habits and mental processes. One day Dr. Anderson and 
I were out on the sea ice and happened to notice a seal basking in 
the sun. As a matter of scientific interest one of us watched 
him through the field glasses, while the other held a watch in 
one hand and a pencil in the other, and noted down the length 
of the naps the seal was taking between his short periods of 
wakefulness. Like other seals at this time of year, he was lying 
beside his hole, enjoying the warm sun. After each short nap 
he would raise his head about twelve inches above the level of the 
ice, take a survey of the horizon, and drop to sleep again. From 
his movements we took down the following series of observations : 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 



109 



Awake 


Asleep 


Awake 


Asleep 


5 seconds 


70 seconds 


4 seconds 


20 seconds 


2 " 


10 




5 " 


30 " 


10 " 


10 




2 " 


5 " 


1 " 


30 




3 " 


18 " 


8 " 


2 




5 " 


90 " 


7 " 


7 




2 " 


60 " 


8 " 


48 




3 " 


4 " 


2 " 


15 




4 " 


48 " 


6 " 


45 









From this we deduced the interesting fact that the ratio of the lengths 
of his periods of wakefuhiess to those of his periods of sleep was as 
1 : 6.6, and further, that the average length of his periods of wake- 
fulness was 4.5 seconds, and the average length of his naps was 30.1 
seconds. 

Another day, watching another seal, we got the following results : 



Awake 


Asleep 


Awake 


Asleep 


8 seconds 


60 seconds 


7 seconds 


50 seconds 


8 " 


22 " 


3 " 


25 " 


4 " 


100 " 


4 " 


18 " 


6 " 


14 " 


4 " 


20 " 



This seal was evidently somewhat more somnolent than the first, 
for his sleeping time was to his waking as 1 : 7.02. He was awake on 
an average 5.5 seconds at a time and his naps averaged 35.6 seconds 
each. 

The whole principle of successfully stalking a seal is just in real- 
izing from the first that he is bound to see you and that your only 
hope is in pretending that you also are a seal. If you act and look 
so as to convince him from the first that you are a brother seal, he 
will regard you with unconcern. To simulate a seal well enough to 
deceive a seal is not difficult, for, to begin with, we know from experi- 
ence that his eye-sight is poor. You can walk up without taking any 
special precautions until, under ordinary conditions of light, you 
are within two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards. Then 
you have to begin to be more careful. You move ahead while he is 
asleep, and when he wakes up you stop motionless. You can safely 



110 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

proceed on all fours until within something less than two hundred 
yards, but after that you will have to play seal more faithfully. Your 
method of locomotion will then have to be that of the seal, which 
does not differ very materially from that of a snake, and which there- 
fore has its disadvantages at a season of the year when the surface 
of the ice is covered with puddles of water anywhere from an inch to 
twenty inches in depth, as it is in spring and early summer. You 
must not only crawl ahead, seal-fashion, but you must be careful to 
always present a side view of your body to the seal, for a man coming 
head-on does not look particularly like a seal. 

Until you are within a hundred yards or so the seal is not hkely to 
notice you, but somewhere between the hundred yard and the seventy- 
five yard mark his attention will suddenly be attracted to you, and 
instead of going to sleep at the end of his ordinary short period of 
wakefulness, he will remain awake and stare at you steadily. The 
seal knows, exactly as well as the seal hunter knows, that no seal in 
this world will sleep continuously for as much as four minutes at a 
time. If you lie still that long, he will know you are no seal, and 
up will go his tail and down he will slide into the water in the 
twinkhng of an eye. When the seal, therefore, has been watching 
you carefully for twenty or thirty seconds, you must raise your 
head twelve or fifteen inches above the ice, look around seal-fashion, 
so that your eyes will sweep the whole circle of the horizon, and 
drop your head again upon the ice. By the time he has seen you 
repeat this process two or three times in the space of five or six min- 
utes he will be convinced that you are a seal, and all his worries 
will be gone. From then on you can proceed more rapidly, crawl- 
ing ahead while he sleeps and stopping while he remains awake, 
never doing anything unbecoming a seal. In this way you can 
crawl within five or ten yards of him if you like, and as a matter of 
fact I have known of expert seal hunters who under emergencies 
would go after a seal without any ordinary weapon and crawl so near 
him that they could seize him by a flipper, pull him away from his 
hole, and club or stab him. My Eskimo companions generally 
used to crawl within about fifteen or twenty yards ; but I have found 
under ordinary circumstances that fifty yards is close enough for a 
man with a rifle. The animal lies on a slippery incline beside his 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 111 

hole, so that the shot that kills him must kill him instantly. It must 
shatter the brain or break the spinal cord of the neck ; the slightest 
quiver of a muscle will send him sliding into the water and all your 
work will have been to no purpose. 

Seals were not common in this locality, and although we got a 
few we were anxious also to get some caribou. The second day 
after our enforced halt Natkusiak and I accordingly went off in 
different directions looking for caribou. It was a long hunt for 
both of us. I returned in about eighteen hours with a young fawn 
for a back-load, which was one of two animals I had seen, while 
Natkusiak returned six or eight hours later with the story of having 
killed two caribou out of three that he saw. Evidently this was no 
paradise for big game. Ducks, however, were very abundant. 

As our main food supply at this time was waterfowl, we 
expected our dogs as well as ourselves to live on ducks, but this did 
not suit them very well at first. Our experience with dogs shows that 
their food prejudices are very much like those of men. It is the com- 
mon opinion of those who keep hotels and boarding schools that they 
can tell much about a man's bringing up from the things he objects 
to eating. The son of wealthy parents who is used to eating fifty 
different articles of food in a week will take readily to the fifty-first ; 
but a farmer's son who from one year's end to another has lived on 
nothing but fat pork, potatoes, bread, and tea, is likely to be so wedded 
to the idea that nothing but pork and potatoes is fit to eat that when 
he meets with a new dish, the fifth or sixth one of his experience, it 
strikes him as an unheard-of thing and unfit for food. It is common 
knowledge among guides in such out of the way places as Iceland 
that the wealthy travelers who visit the country will readily and 
with enjoyment adapt themselves to the food of the peasant, while 
the servants who accompany their wealthy masters have to be spe- 
cially looked after by the guides and insist on being fed on provi- 
sions such as they are used to having in their own country. 

The same principle applies to our house dogs, which are used to 
eating all the varied things that we eat. They are used to so many 
different flavors that they take readily to one more that happens 
to be strange. The white man's dog that comes to the Arctic is 
likely to eat seal meat or any other meat of local growth the first time 



112 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

it is offered him, but take an Indian's dog, that has been brought up 
inland on nothing but caribou meat, and bring him to the coast, and he 
will starve for a week before he is willing to swallow the first mouth- 
ful of seal. Similarly, I have known Eskimo dogs brought up on 
seal meat, which when taken inland would have to be starved for 
a week or more before they would eat the first mouthful of caribou. 

We now had with us dogs which we had brought from the Mac- 
kenzie River and which it had taken several days of starvation to 
teach to eat seal ; we also had with us dogs of Eskimo bringing up 
which had similarly been forced to eat caribou meat, but now all of 
these were simultaneously brought face to face with a new diet 
(ducks), and it took long periods of abstinence from food to enable 
them to get up an appetite for the new dish. An interesting obser- 
vation in this connection is that we have invariably found the con- 
servatism of the females to be greater than that of the males. Out 
of any pack of dogs that are compelled to learn to eat a new kind of 
food, the last to give in are the female dogs. 

Numerous travelers have pointed out that dogs will not eat dog 
meat, and have considered this a proof that dogs have an inherent 
aversion to cannibalism. We have seen nothing to substantiate 
this view, for a dog that has been brought up on seal meat will eat 
dog meat quite as readily as he will caribou, and a dog brought up 
on caribou meat will learn to eat dog meat quite as readily as he will 
learn to eat seal or duck. There is prejudice against the new but 
no disinclination to cannibalism. 

j In the summer season eggs usually form some part of our diet, 
and this year we got the first on June 16th, for Natkusiak found the 
nest of a willow ptarmigan. Although we have spent four summers 
in a country frequented by ptarmigan in large numbers, we have 
not found over a dozen nests all together, for the male continually 
stands guard on some eminence near the nest and gives ample warning 
to the female of the approach of danger, so that the spot where the 
female flies up is never an indication of the location of the nest. 
But if for some reason the male be unable to give warning in season, 
the female will remain on the nest without stirring until you are 
about to step on it. The protective coloration both of the bird 
itself and the eggs is so nearly perfect that to discover them is almost 




The Adaptability of the Skin Boat. 
(1) Umiak being hauled on sled. (2) Umiak under paddles in narrow shore lead. 
(3) Umiak raised on edge to shield goods from rain. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 113 

impossible. A very different matter is the swan's nest, of which 
we found some in the Colville delta, although they are not nearly 
so numerous there as in certain other districts such as the vicinity 
of Cape Parry. You cannot see the ptarmigan until you are about 
to step on them, but a swan sitting on a nest is the most conspicuous 
thing in the animal life of the North, for the nest is on the barren 
shore of some lake and consists of a dun-colored heap of straw the 
size of a bushel basket, upon the top of which the snow-white bird 
can be seen much farther than either the caribou or the grizzly 
bear. From the point of view of food supply a swan's nest is a find 
of some importance, for there are as many as six eggs, and each of them 
is double the size of a goose egg. 

In saying that the ptarmigan eggs of June 16th were the first of 
the season, I am refraining from an encroachment upon Dr. Ander- 
son's special field as an ornithologist. Of course, he had found nests 
of snow buntings, Lapland long-spurs, sandpipers and other small 
fry of that kind much earlier in the season. 

On June 23d we launched the umiak, loaded all our gear into it, 
and paddled away eastward along the coast, through the narrow 
lane of open water between the land and the as yet immovable sea 
ice. On the 24th the first mosquito of the year appeared. We 
saw only a single one that day, but three days later we had them in 
millions. The 25th we entered the western edge of the Colville delta 
proper and the day after that we fell in with a camp of the Colville 
Eskimo, consisting of three families. They told us that during the 
winter all of them had starved more or less, but none to death, 
although they had lost a good many dogs. Now the main body 
of the people were camping at the trading site of Nirlik, about six 
miles to the east, where they would wait for the arrival of the Point 
Barrow traders. 

Rare caribou tracks were to be seen here and there in the delta, 
but none of the Eskimo had killed any so far. On the evening of the 
28th I happened to see a small black dot on the landscape and pointed 
it out to one of the Eskimo, who said it was undoubtedly a mound 
of earth. I let it go at that, for I appreciated the social value of being 
in a position to give away meat rather than to receive it from others ; 
and accordingly Dr. Anderson, Natkusiak, and I set out, when the 



114 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

others were not looking, toward this object, which my glasses had 
shown to be a deer. There turned out to be three of them — all 
very restless on account of the plague of mosquitoes. Dr. Ander- 
son and Natkusiak therefore approached them from one side, and 
myself from the other. Apparently they must have either seen or 
winded them for they came running toward me. They turned out 
to be all skin poor, as was to be expected on account of the season 
of the year, for in June no caribou except the oldest bulls have any 
traces of fat on them whatever in this district. The Colville Eskimo 
consider themselves the greatest caribou hunters in the country 
and to them venison is the one palatable and satisfactory article of 
diet. It was something therefore to be able to show our prowess 
greater than theirs, and to feed them in their own country on caribou 
meat, of which they had not had a taste for several months. 

July 31st we arrived at Nirlik and found thirty-eight people 
there. They were catching numbers of fish in nets set in the river, 
and were sun-drying some of them. A party of eighteen, we were 
told, had gone to the southeastern edge of the Colville delta near 
Oliktok, where they were hunting seal to get skins for their water 
boots for the summer, and oil for their lamps for the coming winter. 

We remained at this village a few days, making various inquiries 
about the country, and the habits and customs of the people, as well 
as taking physical measurements of them. They and their ancestors 
were mostly Colville River people as far back as they knew, which 
in no case was more than four generations, but some of them belonged 
to tribes from across the mountains toward Kotzebue Sound. Most 
of them had hunted, at one time or another, well south into the for- 
ests of the Yukon Valley, where they had always been in the habit 
of meeting the Indians and where of late years they had seen white 
men also. A young woman of the party had had her father killed 
five years before by an Indian, but this seemed to be looked upon as 
a murder rather than an act of war. In general their attitude 
toward the Indians was not different from that which they have 
toward strange tribes of Eskimo. Some of them knew they were 
of Indian blood, and others had relatives who had gone to live among 
the Indians. 

We left the trading village of Nirlik on July 5th, and July 6th we 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 115 

reached the mouth of the ItkilHk River, where we had spent some 
weeks the previous winter and where we had left behind some am- 
munition and other gear. We picked these up now, and then pro- 
ceeded down the eastern arm of the Colville delta, reaching Oliktok 
July 14th. The slowness of our progress was due chiefly to the fact 
that the river we were following, although miles in width in many 
places, was so shallow that our boat kept going continually aground, 
in spite of the fact that it drew no more than a foot of water. Some- 
where along the bottom of this river of magnificent expanses there 
wriggled a narrow boat channel of sufficient depth. From its crooked- 
ness we kept continually losing it, continually going aground, and we 
had to spend half of our time wading about the barely water-covered 
mud-flats in our water-proof sealskin boots, seeking to rediscover 
the mysterious channel which we had just lost and which we gener- 
ally lost again as soon as we had found it. Although the water is 
fresh some distance out to sea of! the Colville delta under ordinary 
conditions, there is a considerable rise of tide even as much as thirty 
or forty miles upstream when a strong southwest wind blows. One 
day when we had been dragging our boat for hours across mud-flats, 
and after all hope of further progress seemed to be gone, the water 
rose suddenly a foot or more and gave us plain sailing where an hour 
or two before the walking had been fairly good. 

A few miles east of Oliktok our further progress was stopped for 
a day by an on-shore wind which brought the lagoon ice in dense 
masses against the shore. The coast line proper is here fenced off 
from the ocean by a series of outlying sand bars or islands, running 
from the Colville delta to the mouth of the Kuparuk River. It was 
therefore none of the sea ice we were facing, but only a comparatively 
thin ice formed in these inclosed waters. The obstruction was there- 
fore not serious and the minute the wind slacked up the ice was sure 
to drift .off again. 

It is a fact not generally understood that old salt-water ice is 
alv/ays fresh. When ice forms in the fall it is as salty as the water 
out of which it is made, and if you take a chunk of it and melt it you 
get brine unfit for the ordinary uses of water. The ice remains salty 
all winter, but the following spring, so soon as the warm weather comes, 
it begins to freshen, and even though the cake be of considerable size 



116 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

it will freshen enough for use in tea-making or other cooking by the 
end of the summer. But the lagoon ice, which has never been over 
six feet thick to begin with, thins down to a few inches by July and 
cakes of it are perfectly fresh by that time, as we abundantly proved 
at Oliktok. I had known for two years about the freshness of old 
sea ice, but it was not until this experience that I knew that the water 
from even this year's ice could, under certain circumstances, be used 
for cooking or drinking. 

On the way from the mouth of the Itkillik to Oliktok I had hunted 
inland several times while the boat was trying to pick its way down- 
stream over the shoals, but I had seen only four caribou, all of which 
I had shot. Proceeding east from Oliktok we did not hunt much 
till we got to the mouth of the Kuparuk River. We were now short 
of meat again, and besides, it blew a head wind ; so we ran the boat 
into the mouth of the river in search both of shelter and of caribou. 
We were in luck, for we found just east of the Kuparuk the largest 
caribou herd we had seen up to that point. Dr. Anderson, who prides 
himself on his conservatism and always estimates numbers at about 
half what he thinks they really are, considered this herd to be about 
four hundred. We shot eight of them, which was all we cared for. 
Most of the deer seen up to now had been young bulls, but this herd 
seemed to consist of a mixture of young bulls and cows with calves. 

Eight deer were really more than we should have killed, for our 
boat, after picking up our caches in the Colville delta and at Oliktok, 
was already overloaded. It was out of the question to try to carry 
green meat along, so we camped for a few days, drying the meat to 
make it lighter and easier to haul as well as to insure its not being 
spoilt. 

It was now time for the Eskimo of Point Barrow to be coming 
along from the west on their annual trading voyage to Flaxman Is- 
land. On account of our heavy load it was dangerous for us to at- 
tempt the sea passage outside of the shoals which lie off the mouths of 
the larger rivers, such as the next one east of us, the Sagavanirktok. 
We were wishing, therefore, that our delay in drying the meat of the 
caribou we had killed would enable these traders to overtake us, so 
we could get some of them to lighten our boat as far as Flaxman 
Island. I knew they would appreciate the deer meat we had to 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 117 

give them, and while no formal payment is as yet needed to induce 
even the most civilized Eskimo to do you a service when he finds you 
in trouble on a journey, yet it would not be amiss to put them in 
good humor through a gift of meat. In fact, it had been largely 
with that end in view that we had shot so many caribou to begin with. 

On the morning of July 28th we saw a boat-sail out at sea, but 
strangely enough it was coming from the east. We had been expect- 
ing boats from the west only. It turned out that this was Mr. Ned 
Arey and his son, Gallagher, who were on their way to Point Barrow 
to buy some provisions for the coming winter. They had had head 
winds and were short of provisions, and caribou meat had not been 
abundant with them during the year, so they enjoyed our feast of 
meat as much as the Eskimo would. The next day the Point 
Barrow boats arrived and, as we expected, took on some of our 
freight, which made the remainder of the journey to Flaxman 
Island a simple one. 

At Flaxman Island on August 5th we met our Eskimo Ilavinirk, 
who had come with the whale-boat to meet us from Barter Island. 
We stopped for three days at the Flaxman Island trading village, 
and then continued eastward in company with several Eskimo boats 
that had come up from Herschel Island for trading purposes. We 
stopped now and then for fishing and went occasionally ashore to 
look for caribou ; and now and again we were delayed by head winds 
— sometimes for a few hours and sometimes for a few days — until 
finally, when a protracted calm stopped us some thirty miles west of 
Herschel Island, I made up my mind to hurry ahead in our skin- 
boat, leaving Dr. Anderson with our whale-boat and the other Eskimo 
boats to follow later. I took with me my favorite companion, 
Natkusiak, and an elderly countrywoman of his named Panniga- 
bluk, whose husband had died the year before and who had been 
taken on with our party as a seamstress. 

No sooner had we left Dr. Anderson than we sighted caribou 
inland. It was evidently a big bull and we were very anxious to 
get him, for the skins of the bulls about the middle of August are in 
ideal condition for winter boot-soles and the animals then are fatter 
than at any other season. We got within range of the bull, fired 
at him, and wounded him. Just as he started off for the mountains I 



118 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

happened to turn around, and saw a sail to the westward, the first 
of the incoming whahng ships, which, according to the news we re- 
ceived at Point Barrow, we had not expected to come at all. I there- 
fore left Natkusiak to follow the wounded bull while I ran as fast as 
I could the six miles to the coast to make a smoke signal for the whaler, 
and if necessary to put out in our boat to intercept her, for I recog- 
nized even from the mountains that the ship was Captain Peder- 
sen's schooner the Challenge, which had been wintering at Point 
Barrow, and I knew Captain Pedersen would be willing to go out of 
his way to do us a service. When I got down to the coast the faint 
breeze of the morning had given out completely and the Challenge 
lay becalmed a mile or so offshore just a little west of our camp. 
It turned out that Natkusiak had plenty of time to kill the wounded 
bull he was following, but on account of his fear that the wind might 
come up again and take the ship away, he brought back with him 
only the skin and forty pounds or so of back-fat, abandoning all the 
meat to the wolves and foxes. It was a great pity to waste over two 
hundred pounds of prime venison, especially as we had for several 
months been living on lean, flavorless meat. It took a good while for 
all of us to get over thinking about the feast of which accident had 
deprived us, and later when we boarded the Challenge and told 
Captain Pedersen about it he was scarcely less regretful, for he 
and his men were without fresh meat. 

It took the Challenge about half a day to cover the six or eight 
miles between the place where we first saw her and our camp, but when 
she came abreast of us we signaled her, loaded our boat and went 
aboard. It was about midnight then. We had a calm for several 
hours after that, but before noon of the next day the wind freshened 
up and we made good speed. We dropped anchor in the harbor of 
Herschel Island, August 18th. 

^ Captain Pedersen told us that one whaler at least. Captain Cottle 
with the Karluk, was coming into the Arctic and might be expected 
at Herschel Island any day. Captain Cottle arrived, as a matter of 
fact, the 19th of August, and kindly offered to take me and my party 
eastward to Cape Bathurst. 

It was one of our serious misfortunes that Dr. Anderson and his 
section of our party were not at Herschel Island also to take advan- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 119 

tage of this offer. As I learned later, they had spent too much time 
in caribou hunting and had besides been delayed a day by allowing 
the dogs to get away inland chasing caribou. They were of course 
forced to wait for them until their hunting desires had been quenched 
and they straggled one by one back to the coast again, for one can- 
not at the beginning of winter afford to lose his dogs. Up to the last 
moment I hoped that Anderson might turn up before the Karluk 
would have to set sail. It was not to be, however, for the Karluk 
hove anchor the morning of August 24th and carried us off on a short 
whaling cruise toward Banks Island. 

Captain Cottle had intended to land us at Cape Bathurst before 
going on the Banks Island cruise, but while crossing the mouth of the 
Mackenzie River (where, by the way, we sailed for a whole day 
through fresh water although no land was in sight), a gale blew up 
which increased so in violence that when we approached the harbor 
at the Baillie Islands, just off Cape Bathurst, Captain Cottle did not 
consider it safe to try entering through the somewhat devious chan- 
nel and we were forced therefore to sail past. Under other circum- 
stances I should not have regretted the delay much, for the cruise 
gave us the chance to see the taking of a bow-head whale, an unusual 
spectacle nowadays anywhere in the world, and one which not many 
are likely to see hereafter, for the whaling industry as carried on by 
the big ships is a thing of the past in the Arctic.^ Now, however, 
we were anxious to get ashore somewhere near Cape Parry, to com- 
mence, while yet there was time, the autumn hunt for caribou to 
supply us with skins for clothing for the coming winter. We were 
now in a locality where we could put into operation our principle 
of " living on the country," and we had to live on the country, not 
only in the matter of food but also in the matter of clothing. 

August 26th the Karluk finally put in at the Baillie Islands and we 
transferred from her to Captain Wolki's Rosie H. which we found 
waiting, there for us. The Rosie H. was going down to Cape 

1 A commercial substitute — an imitation whalebone — has recently been 
invented. This is so cheap and so satisfactory a substitute for whalebone in 
most of its uses that the market for whalebone seems permanently gone. 
The winter of 1905-1906 there were eleven whaling vessels in the western 
Arctic ; of these in the winter 1912-1913 the Belvedere alone remained, and 
the summer of 1913 she goes north for trading purposes only. 



120 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Parry to try to get some coal from a wrecked whaling ship, the 
Alexander, which went ashore there in a fog in August, 1906, and 
which was still lying solid upon the rocks where her crew had left 
her. August 29th the Rosie H. tied up alongside the wreck of 
the Alexander. The Rosie H. was able to go all around the 
Alexander where she lay hard aground, for although a ship of some- 
thing like eighty tons, she is flat-bottomed and draws less than six feet 
of water, while the Alexander drew sixteen in her day. She is now 
aground in nine feet of water forward and thirteen at the stern, which 
gives some idea of the force with which she was driven upon the rocks 
by the combined power of her engine and of all her sails, for she was 
at the time making nine knots before a fresh breeze. The rocky 
shore sprang so suddenly out of the fog that there was no time to 
reverse the engines or to give an order to the man at the wheel. 



CHAPTER VIII 

IN a way, the real work of the expedition began with our 
landing at Cape Parry. Hitherto we had been in a country 
frequented by white traders and whalers and by semi-civilized 
Christian Eskimo, but now we had left all that behind. Cape 
Parry is about one hundred miles east as one travels by sled 
in winter from the Bailhe Islands and Cape Bathurst, the most 
easterly settlement of the civihzed Eskimo. The country to 
the eastward was known to us only through having been skirted 
twice in summer by Sir John Richardson's exploring parties, first 
in 1826 and again in 1848. Their boats had usually stood along 
well offshore, traveling in fog and all sorts of weather, so that 
the information their account gives us of the coast is necessarily 
fragmentary and inconclusive. We had already learned, and were 
destined to learn more fully later, that while the Cape Bathurst 
Eskimo had no doubt, a century or so ago, had frequent and contin- 
uous communication with the Eskimo to the east, the country was 
entirely unknown to the present generation ; and as for us, we had 
no means of telling whether it was inhabited or not. True, we knew 
from the records of the English explorers that Coronation Gulf was 
peopled by Eskimo, and Victoria Island also, as late as 1852, but no 
one had ever seen people on the stretch of coast running from Corona- 
tion Gulf west three hundred miles to Cape Parry. The evidence, 
so far as we had any, was negative, for Richardson on his two voyages 
through Dolphin and Union Straits had seen no people. But my 
reasoning was that this did not prove the non-existence of people, for 
he had touched the coast only at rare intervals, and that at a season 
when a migratory population like the Eskimo would be expected to 
be absent from the seashore, inland hunting caribou, or spearing fish. 
When the Rosie H. landed us at Cape Parry she put ashore 
also that portion of our gear which Dr. Anderson did not have in his 

121 



122 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

whale-boat when we separated, and provisions equal to about three 
months' rations for four men. Most of these I had secured from Cap- 
tain Cottle and Captain Pedersen, and Captain Cottle had given me 
also several hundred pounds of whale blubber from the whale which 
he had taken while I was aboard his ship. All these things we 
stored in an old house which had been built on shore near the wreck 
of the Alexander by Baillie Islands Eskimo who had come down 
during the winter of 1906-1907 to plunder the vessel, after the news 
had come to them of her being wrecked and deserted by her 
crew. 

We had no expectation of finding many caribou on the Cape Parry 
peninsula. It was our intention therefore to load our skin-boat with 
a selection of things we thought we might need, and sail south toward 
Langton Bay. But the Rosie H. had landed our outfit on an 
exposed rocky beach, and it took two trips for our boat to transfer 
it to the deserted house where it was to be stored. We had installed 
the first load safely and were loading up the boat for the second trip 
when a northwest wind suddenly blew up, making the exposed bit 
of coast on which we were working a very unsafe place for us. If 
the wind had blown up half an hour sooner, while our boat was yet 
empty, we could have run it ashore and pulled it up on the beach out 
of reach of the waves ; or had the wind come half an hour later we 
should have had the boat unloaded and our stores safely within 
doors. But it came at just the wrong moment. The surf instantly 
increased to a dangerous one for landing, so that an attempt to make 
one would have resulted both in the wrecking of the boat and the loss 
of many of the things in it. Half a mile away was the entrance to 
a deep fjord, and our only course was to run for shelter there, which 
we did. The wind kept blowing steadily from the northwest for 
several days, and while at first we landed within the fjord, expecting 
to be able to get back, we eventually gave this up and started south 
toward Langton Bay with a bigger load than we had intended to 
carry, consisting chiefly of articles for which we had no immediate 
need, while others that we needed remained behind at Cape 
Parry. 

The northern portion of the Cape Parry peninsula consists of rocky 
hills running up to an extreme height of perhaps six hundred feet. It 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 123 

is nearly cut into many islands by the deep fjords which run into the 
land from both sides. This peculiarity of topography was of use to 
us, for the weather continued stormy, and in one case we found it 
advisable, in order to get a sheltered route to the south, to portage 
our boat and its contents across a neck of land about a hundred yards 
wide, which separated a fjord some five or six miles in length from 
another still larger to the south of it. 

In our hunting excursions, and such walks as we took across the 
land for purposes of investigation, we began to find here and there the 
same type of human remains which we were destined to continue find- 
ing for more than a year to come in all the country between Cape 
Bathurst and Coronation Gulf. They had been, those vanished 
men, a people who did not make their camps down by the seashore, 
but only on the tops of high hills. Evidently they had used wood 
for fuel in summer. They had, in their excursions inland, been in the 
habit of carrying it with them from the beach, so that on any high 
hill-top we were likely to find a few sticks of decayed wood, as well 
as tent-rings of stone and stone fire-places where they had done their 
cooking. Later on, after we discovered people to the east, we found 
them using exactly such fire-places at camps pitched on exactly such 
hills. Long before we found people we had learned to recognize in 
the most casual glance at a landscape the hills upon which ruins 
were likely to be found, although why just such hills were chosen 
we did not fully understand until we found people occupying them 
and were able to ask about whys and wherefores. 

Of course these that we speak of are only summer camps. The 
ruins of the permanent dwellings where the people had lived in winter 
are found down on the sea beach in just the locations which the Es- 
kimo of to-day would choose for carrying on sealing. These houses 
had long ago fallen into ruins, and while there is no scale by which 
we can judge their age archseologically, I am now convinced, on the 
basis of a collation of various kinds of evidence, that none of them are 
very old, although none of them can be more recent than about 1840. 

Besides the house ruins and the camp-sites we found also the graves 
of the people, containing broken sleds upon which the bodies had been 
hauled to the graveyard, as well as property which the relatives of 
the dead had left with them. These things we collected, and they 



124 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

have their scientific interest, but a discussion of them is somewhat 
too technical for our present purposes. 

Head winds and violent gales are frequent at this time of year, 
and we made slow progress toward Langton Bay, partly on account 
of the gales and partly because the country was strange to us ; so 
that we spent much time in looking for caribou in a district where we 
now know they are not to be found at this time of year. We had 
good luck in sealing, however. One day, for instance, as we were 
sailing along, Natkusiak shot from our boat a bearded seal, which 
promptly sank. We camped about five miles away, and the next 
morning a gathering of gulls about two hundred yards from our tent 
led us to the spot where the dead seal had floated ashore during the 
night. On another day, while I was looking for caribou, a polar bear 
that I should under ordinary circumstances not have seen took it 
into his head to hunt me, with the inevitable result. 

We had been talking over various plans, and all of us agreed that 
the thing to do at this season of the year was to find a river and ascend 
it inland as far as possible, for it was clear that the caribou had 
already left the coast. The reasons for following a river inland, in- 
stead of striking across country, are mainly two : first, a boat of shal- 
low draft can be taken upstream a considerable distance along most 
of the Arctic rivers ; and secondly, one may expect a river valley to 
be stocked with a heavy growth of willow suitable for fuel, even in 
places where spruce trees are not to be found. 

I had with me the same chart which had misled us the fall before 
and had been the direct cause of our losing a year through getting 
tangled up in Smith Bay. I considered, however, that by the laws 
of chance some portion of the chart ought to be in fair accordance 
with the facts, and here we were now near the place where a large 
river, known as the "River la Ronciere," is drawn across the map 
with great detail as heading to the southeast several hundred miles 
away, near Bear Lake, and entering the Arctic Ocean at the foot 
of the Parry peninsula. The day we came to that part of the 
coast where the mouth of the river is laid down on the chart, we 
found, sure enough, that there was every appearance to indicate 
that this was the delta of a considerable river. There was a big 
bight filled with many low alluvial islands and the shores of these 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 125 

were strewn with willows and small spruce drift-wood, all of which 
might reasonably be supposed to come from such a river as the 
"la Ronciere" is on the map. 

On the evening of September 8th I made the following entry in 
my diary : " We are exactly to-night where Petitot's River la Ron- 
ciere le Noury should be, and we seem to be in the mouth of a river 
— a strange thing if true, for it shows that Arctic maps cannot be 
relied upon to be invariably wrong." The following day, however, 
September 9th, my diary has this entry: "River la Ronciere does 
not seem to be the exception that I took it to be ; yesterday we found 
the mouth of a small river and followed it up a few miles but it turned 
out to come from a lake about 4 or 5 miles inland. The lake is about 
2 miles wide and 4 or 5 miles long, and it seems to be the head of 
our river." Further investigations showed us that in reality this 
creek is about thirty miles long instead of three hundred, as the 
"River la Ronciere" is represented to be on the chart, and that 
the "River la Ronciere" is in fact non-existent. 

The consequences of following our chart were not as serious here 
as they had been in Smith Bay the year before, but still the detour 
lost us two days of fair weather with a light offshore breeze that would 
have taken us to Langton Bay September 8th. We got there, how- 
ever, all safe, September 11th, after a good deal of hard rowing in a 
rough sea against adverse winds. 

The characteristics of Langton Bay deserve a paragraph and per- 
haps more than that, for circumstances kept bringing us back to it, 
and it was, more nearly than any other place, the base from which 
we conducted most of our operations for three years. The bay 
itself is roughly triangular in shape, with each side of the triangle 
ten miles or so in length, and with an opening of about two miles at 
its western angle or apex, through which it can be entered from the 
main body of Franklin Bay, the southeast corner of which it forms. 

Langton Bay as a whole is very shallow, and it is probable that no 
ship of any size can enter it, but just outside of its mouth is a sand- 
spit half a mile long that joins the mainland at an angle of about 
30°. This sandspit and the harbor it forms were first seen by Sir 
John Richardson, who incorrectly states that the mouth of it is so 
shallow that the harbor would be of no use to vessels of any size. 



126 ' MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

As a matter of fact, the entrance around the point of the sandspit 
is so deep that vessels of sixteen-feet draft can safely run within 
twenty yards of shore and have done so, for Langton Bay has at 
three diiTerent times, for a winter each time, been the harbor of 
whaling ships. 

This is the most easterly outpost of the whaling industry, and the 
place has not been visited since 1897(?). One of the whale ships 
when wintering at Langton Bay built a small house ashore for the 
occupancy of the Alaskan and other western Eskimo who formed part 
of the crew. This house is still standing, and during three years 
we used it as the storehouse for our steadily growing scientific col- 
lections, as well as for ammunition and anything else which we needed 
to keep there. 

As a wintering place, Langton Bay has two main defects : first, 
that drift-wood for fuel is scarce in the neighborhood; and second, 
that Franklin Bay is so deep that polar bears seldom come so far south 
as Langton Bay, for they follow the open water, which is found chiefly 
outside a line drawn from the tip of Cape Bathurst to that of Cape 
Parry ; and neither do the caribou come near, for the country is not 
suitable as a feeding ground for them in winter. Such an expedi- 
tion as ours, which lives on the country, may therefore use Langton 
Bay only as a point of departure; and although we considered it 
home for a period of three years, we did not stay there three months 
all together. 

We had no sooner landed at the Langton Bay harbor than we 
began preparations for going inland hunting, and, with us, to begin 
preparations was to be ready in a few hours. Although talkative by 
nature, Pannigabluk did not mind being alone for a day or a few 
days, so we left her to fix up camp as well as she could on the 
coast, while Natkusiak hunted southeast and I southwest in the 
hope of finding caribou. 

At Langton Bay the Melville Mountains, about a thousand feet 
high, are three miles inland. They are really the sea-front of a pla- 
teau that slopes almost imperceptibly south from their crest to Horton 
River, ten miles farther inland. Each of us climbed the mountains 
by a separate ravine, and each reached a commanding peak at about 
the same time. We were three miles apart, but could see each other 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 127 

clearly with the glasses. It was evident to me that Natkusiak soon 
got his eye on game to the south of him, for he spent but little time 
on his peak — there is always something decisive and unmistakable 
about a hunter's actions when he sets out toward a distant band of 
caribou. I read the signs clearly and with satisfaction, but I knew 
my man and that he needed no help, so, although I saw nothing from 
my point of vantage (except scenery, which at the approach of an 
Arctic winter has no attractiveness save as a fitting background for 
caribou), I started southwest in the hope of picking up something. 

The afternoon developed for me into a profitless twenty-mile 
tramp over the spongy tundra. There were few tracks of caribou, 
none very fresh, and all going east — evidently we were a little too 
late to intercept the few animals that had spent the summer toward 
Liverpool Bay and were now moving to other pastures. I had given 
up hope of game for the day and had turned home, for the dusk of 
the short night was approaching, when I saw over a small ridge what 
I took to be the flutter of a raven. A little farther on, and I thought 
I saw four ravens. They were not quite in my line of march down the 
mountain toward the sea, so I turned my glasses on them, thinking 
to see if it was the carcass of a caribou they were feeding on. It was 
fortunate for me and for the American Museum that I was inquisitive, 
for this proved my first sight of the Barren Ground grizzly, Ursus 
ardos richardsoni, perhaps the rarest of the large land carnivorse 
of the world in museums and the least known scientifically ; but my 
inquisitiveness was unlucky for the bear, for he became the nucleus of 
our collection, which finally grew to number nineteen specimens. 
It was his four paws I had taken for four ravens ; for he had been 
lying on his back, pawing the air like a fat puppy — and fat he was, 
in truth. On the rump the blubber layer was about four inches 
thick, for he was an old male almost ready for hibernation. In the 
hurry of skinning him, a good deal of the fat remained with the hide ; 
I allowed the paws and head to go with the skin for mounting pur- 
poses, and the matted, woolly hair was wet, all of which went toward 
making that skin one of the heaviest back-loads I ever carried to 
camp — it must have weighed upwards of two hundred pounds. 
Natkusiak had seen several deer, but had been able to approach 
only three before it became too dark to shoot. He got those three, 



128 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

all fairly fat. In an Arctic existence ordered as ours the necessities 
of life are meat and skins; the luxuries are fat caribou meat and 
short-haired summer caribou skins. We had, therefore, begun well. 
In one day we had secured meat enough for perhaps three weeks, 
skins enough for one suit of outer clothes, and oil enough for light for 
a month. 

The next day Natkusiak and I hunted together. There were no 
caribou near the coast, but about ten miles inland we saw seven, 
all of which we shot. Ten caribou and a bear made a pretty good 
showing for the first two days of hunting, but we found that we had 
come to the end of our rope. The animals we had secured had been 
the rear guard of the east-moving herd, and it soon became evident 
that we could reach no more game from a hunting base on the sea- 
coast. We therefore cached the meat of the bear and the three 
deer first killed at Langton Bay, and moved camp about ten miles 
inland to where we had buried the meat of the seven caribou — buried 
it with the double idea of keeping it fresh in the cool ground until the 
freeze-up (which was now only a few days distant) and of protecting 
it from foxes. 

The second day after moving camp inland I had one of the pleas- 
antest surprises of my traveling experience. The general topog- 
raphy of the country led me to believe there should be a river at a 
greater or less distance to the southwest. To ascertain the truth of 
this I had gone about five miles southwest, when I suddenly came 
upon a deep ravine. Looking down this for half a mile to where it 
had its mouth into another and deeper ravine, I saw a small band 
of little Christmas trees struggling up the steep bank. I have never 
been half so glad to see the sun after its midwinter absence. I had 
intended to make an all-day hunt, but the news was too good to 
keep — the Eskimo were at home, I knew, and I had to go and tell 
them about it. The branch of evergreen I took to them carried an 
invitation not to be resisted. None of us had suspected that trees 
were anywhere near. We had been using small green willow twigs 
for fire. It was already autumn; ice formed every night on the 
ponds, and the drizzling rains of the season made comfort impos- 
sible on the shelterless barren ground. There were no two opinions, 
therefore, about moving camp ; and the following night found us 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 129 

sitting by a crackling fire of dry wood in a sheltered spruce grove in 
my creek-bottom. This creek proved to be a branch of Horton River, 
a stream about the size of the Hudson that it has been our privilege 
to add to the map of North America. 

This was the harvest season on the Arctic tundra ; the caribou 
were still short-haired, and their skins therefore suitable for cloth- 
ing; they were still fat, and their meat therefore good eating; 
but we knew that the approach of cold weather was about to change 
all that. We expected every day that Anderson's party would come 
to join ours, in which case — between men and dogs — our supply 
of meat would last less than a month. The Rosie H. had, it was 
true, landed about three months' supplies for us, besides ammunition 
and other gear, at Cape Parry, about seventy-five miles to the north, 
but these supplies we hoped not to be forced to touch for a long 
time, for we had several years — it turned out to be three — of work 
ahead of us, and could count on no reinforcements. We hunted, 
therefore, energetically every day from dawn till dark, but saw no 
caribou. One day, however, I picked up two more grizzlies. We 
were in the habit of considering a full-grown grizzly equal in food 
value to about two large bull caribou. I also shot a fat white wolf, 
which gave us a good seventy-five pounds of excellent meat. -"^ 

On September 29th we had the first heavy snowfall of the year. 
The snow and ice are one's best friends in the North, for they make 
travel easy. Up to this time we had been forced to make beasts of 
burden both of ourselves and our three dogs ; we carried our camp 
gear on our backs from place to place, and whenever we killed an 
animal we had to pack the meat and skin home. Carrying a hundred- 
pound back-load of meat ten or fifteen miles home over boggy ground 
is more like work than sport, especially after an all-day hunt, when 
darkness overtakes you while you are skinning your game or cutting 
up the meat. So soon, therefore, as there was sufficient snow on 
the ground we made a trip to Langton Bay to get our sled, and then 
proceeded southeast up Horton River in the hope of overtaking the 
caribou which, as we knew by their tracks, had gone in that direc- 
tion about three weeks before. 

Before starting we cached, as safely as we could, not only our store 
of meat, but most carefully of all, the grizzly bear skins, which we 



130 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

considered priceless scientifically. We took little meat with us, and 
the first night out one of our dogs stole half of that. On the third 
day of the up-river journey we supped on the half of an Arctic fox 
I shot that day, and breakfasted on the other half. That morning, 
however, we came on the tracks of eight young bull caribou. Leav- 
ing Pannigabluk to pitch camp, Natkusiak and I followed these, 
overtook them about five miles away, and killed seven of the eight. 
We soon found that we had overtaken the rear guard of the caribou, 
and as we were anxious that Dr. Anderson's party should overtake 
us as soon as possible, we built here a permanent house of wood, 
sod, and moss, and prepared to spend the winter. During the re- 
mainder of October we shot sixteen more caribou and hauled their 
meat safely to camp. 

At this point we made the first serious mistake of the year. I 
myself did not worry much about Dr. Anderson's not turning up, for 
I considered that he had probably been unable to get any farther 
than the Mackenzie delta by open water, and that he was, therefore, 
hardly overdue ; but my Eskimo were of the opinion that his Eskimo 
might possibly have "struck" and refused, on account of fear of 
hunger, to accompany him farther east than the most easterly Eskimo 
settlement (at the Baillie Islands). They therefore advised that we 
should make the 150-mile trip to the Baillie Islands to let the news 
get out that we had found caribou. If we did not actually meet 
Dr. Anderson there, they argued, the news would eventually get to 
his party, and his Eskimo would then be all eagerness to come and 
help us eat our store of venison. I yielded to these persuasions 
unwisely ; we should, of course, have stayed where we were to make 
hay while the sun shone — to kill more caribou while we yet had 
daylight enough for shooting purposes. Dr. Anderson was in no 
danger ; for if he could not get his Eskimo to go where he wanted 
them to, he could always stay where they wanted to stay, as I had 
had to do myself on a former expedition — the winter of 1906 in 
the Mackenzie delta. 

I let the arguments of my Eskimo prevail, and we accordingly 
left Pannigabluk to look after our camp and protect our meat caches 
from the wolverines while Natkusiak and I went to the coast to look 
for Dr. Anderson. We met him and his party on their way to join 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 131 

us; it was a pleasing thing to see him a fortnight earlier than we 
should have done ; but this trip to the coast was the beginning of our 
misfortunes. 

Inland on Horton River we were short of ammunition, tea, and 
tobacco — the first of which is a real necessity ; the last two are 
considered necessities by the Mackenzie Eskimo. It was there- 
fore decided that Dr. Anderson, Natkusiak, and Pikaluk (a man who 
had at his own instance joined Dr. Anderson's party) should make a 
quick trip to Cape Parry for a supply of these necessities, while 
I returned to our hunting-camp up the river with the remaining five 
of Dr. Anderson's party : Ilavinirk, his wife, Mamayauk, their nine- 
year-old daughter, Nogasak, and an eighteen-year-old boy, Palaiyak, 
whom they had adopted, and Kunasluk, a decrepit rheumatic old 
man, the father of Pikaluk. 

When we parted with Dr. Anderson, November 23d, at the mouth 
of Horton River, we each had about two days' provisions. It was 
blowing a bhzzard from the southwest and was very cold, but the 
wind was nearly fair for him, and he would be able, we thought, to 
make our meat cache at Langton Bay in three days (which he suc- 
ceeded in doing). It would take us longer, we knew, to get home to 
our hunting-camp. It turned out that it took us thirteen days. 
The sun was gone, and there were blizzards more than half the time. 
We had counted on getting both ptarmigan and rabbits along the 
way, but on account of the snowstorms and darkness we got not a 
single rabbit and only seven ptarmigan. 

On the beach near the mouth of Horton River we had dis- 
covered the carcass of a bow-head whale that had (we afterward 
learned) been dead four years. It would have been securely hidden 
from sight by the level three feet or so of snow that covered it had 
not the Arctic foxes smelled it out and by their tracks and burrow- 
ings given us the clue. After working half a day to shovel off the 
snow, we got at the carcass at last, and chopped off from the tongue 
of the huge animal about a hundred pounds of what we intended for 
dog feed. When fresh the tongue is mostly fat, but after four years 
of weathering there remained chiefly the connective tissues, so that 
what we cut off more resembled chunks of felt than pieces of meat. 
Of these one hundred pounds Dr. Anderson and I each had taken 



132 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

half; he took no more because he expected to reach Langton Bay 
with its cache of caribou and bear-meat in three days; I took no 
more because I expected to find plenty of small game along Horton 
River as we ascended it toward our main camp. 
' After Dr. Anderson left us we were kept in camp two days by a 
blizzard so violent that our dogs would not face it. Whether your 
dogs will or will not face the wind is the test of fit and unfit traveling 
weather in the Arctic, for a properly dressed man will face a wind 
that is too much for the Eskimo dog. These two storm-bound days 
used up most of our ordinary food, and on the first day of actual 
travel we were on half-allowance. The second day out we boiled up 
some sealskins that we had intended for boots ; the third day we ate 
some more skins and boiled a little of the whale tongue. This last 
all of us found unpalatable, for the tongue had been so long awash 
on the beach that it had become thoroughly impregnated with sea 
salts (other than sodium chloride). No doubt it was these salts, 
too, that made us sick, so that two or three days farther on our jour- 
ney, when — betw een men and dogs — we had finished the whale 
tongue, we were really better off than while we had it. We had 
tried slicing it thin and boiling it twice and even three times, but it 
seemed impossible to get rid of the quinine-like bitterness. 

I must not give the impression that we were really starving, or 
even suffering much from hunger. We had plenty of seal-oil — a 
sealskin bag full of it — and of this we ate all we wanted. All of us 
found, however, that we could not take much of it "straight" — 
the stomach needs bulky food ; it craves to be filled with something. 
For this reason we used to eat the oil soaked up in tea leaves, ptar- 
migan feathers, or caribou hair. Most commonly we used to take 
long-haired caribou skin, cut it in small pieces, dip the pieces in oil, 
and eat them that way. This is, too, the method we used in feeding 
oil to dogs in an emergency; on this trip, as on many other occa- 
sions, we and our dogs fared exactly alike. 

The tenth day out (December 4th) we camped near the place 
where two months before we had cached our grizzly bear skins. I had 
then been so profoundly impressed with their value to science that 
I had spent a day in burying them safely in frozen ground ; now their 
food value impressed us so strongly that we spent a day in digging 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 133 

them up to eat the heads and paws, though we destroyed thereby 
the scientific vakie of the skins. There was one ham of caribou 
cached at the same place, but that and the heads and paws of the 
bears all went in one day, as well as five Canada jays we had killed 
and kept as ornithological specimens, our dogs getting a share, of 
course. They were now so weak that we had to pull most of the 
weight of the sleds ourselves, though we were a little weak, too. 
I have noticed — and Dr. Anderson's experience has been the same 
as mine — that on a diet of fats alone one gradually loses strength, 
but that this symptom of malnutrition is not so conspicuous as 
sleepiness and a mental inability to call quickly into action such 
strength as one has. 

After a day of high living on the one caribou ham, eight bear-paws, 
and five Canada jays we were down to a diet of skins and oil again. 
We also ate our snow-shoe lashings and several fathoms of other raw- 
hide thongs — fresh rawhide is good eating ; it reminds one of pig's 
feet, if well boiled. It occurs to one in this connection (seriously 
speaking) that one of the material advantages of skin clothing over 
woolens in Arctic exploration is that one can eat them in an emer- 
gency, or feed them to one's dogs if the need is not quite so pressing. 
This puts actual starvation off by a week or so. As for eating one's 
dogs, the very thought is an abomination. Not that I have any 
prejudice against dog-meat, as such ; it is probably very much like 
wolf, and wolf I know to be excellent. But on a long, hard sled trip 
the dogs become your friends ; they work for you single-mindedly 
and uncomplainingly; they revel with you in prosperity and good 
fortune ; they take starvation and hard knocks with an equanimity 
that says to you : " We have seen hard times together before, we 
shall see good times again; but if this be the last, you can count 
on us to the end." To me the death of a dog that has stood by me 
in failure and helped me to success is the death of a comrade in arms ; 
to eat him would be but a step removed from cannibalism. 

After finishing our bear-paws we had only two more days on deer- 
skins and oil, and it was lucky we had no more, for on the evening of 
the second day when we were about eighteen miles short of our camp, 
Ilavinirk, Mamayauk, and Kunasluk all complained of weakness 
and Mamayauk seemed so sick that w^e feared not being able to move 



134 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

camp the following day. For some days past the dogs had not been 
pulling much. They had been losing strength faster than we, for 
although they had about the same allowance as we of deerskins and 
oil, they were forced to sleep outdoors in the cold while we had al- 
ways our cozy and cheerful camp, and the cold saps strength as quickly 
as does hard work. Ilavinirk and I had therefore been pulling 
the sleds with little assistance from the dogs, and now it seemed clear 
that if he were to cease work and Mamayauk's weight were to be 
added to the sled, it would be out of the question for me alone to try 
to move it. Evidently the one thing for me to do was to try to hurry 
ahead to where Pannigabluk was guarding our meat cache, to fetch 
a back-load of food for men and dogs. 

Although I was both tired and sleepy I accordingly, at the end 
of the day's work on December 7th, shared with the rest my last 
meal of skins and oil, and then, between 8.30 p.m. and 4.15 next 
morning, I walked through a starlit night against a fairly strong 
wind the eighteen miles to our camp. I found Pannigabluk up and 
cooking over a cheerful open fire, for, like many other elderly people, 
she was an early riser. It was a pleasant home-coming. Contrary 
to what might have been expected, I did not sit down to a huge 
meal. I was too tired for that, and sleepy, and tumbled at once 
into bed. It was not until 10.30 o'clock in the forenoon that Pan- 
nigabluk, according to my directions, awoke me to eat. At 11.45 
I was on the road back, with thirty pounds or so of dried meat. I 
met the party about five miles away from our camp, for Mamayauk 
had felt better in the morning and was able to travel. We made 
camp where I met them and by noon the next day we were all sitting 
around huge troughs of boiled venison in our comfortable winter 
house. Most of the meat we had killed in the fall was still on 
hand. Pannigabluk had of course eaten some while we were away, 
and a wolverine had stolen a few pieces from under her very nose — 
they are animals with a genius for thievery and mischief. For the 
time our prospects were not bad, except that out of the six Eskimo 
I now had with me three were more or less sick from the effects of 
the diet of deer hair and oil — or rather, perhaps, from the effect of 
overeating when they got where meat was abundant. We now had 
meat to do us about two months, we thought, but we were short of 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 135 

fat. Some blubber cached on the coast was one of the things Dr. 
Anderson had gone to get for us. 

When we arrived at our home camp, December 7th, it seemed for 
the time being that all our troubles were over. We took a look the 
next day at our stock of caribou meat and it was an imposing pile. 
But then, frozen carcasses always do make a great showing. We 
agreed that there must be food enough there for two months for men 
and dogs, and fresh caribou tracks were numerous all around the 
house, so that it seemed we surely ought to be able to get plenty 
more fresh meat when the stock on hand was gone. 

A band of caribou passed the house early in the morning of our 
second day at home and we saw their tracks an hour or two after. 
I took the trail and followed it a few hours, but my long walk home 
two nights before had chafed my feet badly and I was lame. There 
seemed no pressing need for getting these particular deer; had our 
meat pile been smaller I should not of course have returned without 
at least sighting the animals, but now seeing we had such abundance 
of meat at home, I turned about at noon and limped slowly homeward. 
For two days after that I stayed in the house to get my feet in proper 
condition. When I went out again hunting on the third day after 
that, there were no fresh tracks to be seen. 

At the point on Horton River where our house was situated, there 
were woods not only in the valley proper, but also on top of the hill to 
the west, stretching unbroken three hundred miles to the Mackenzie, so 
far as we knew. To the east of the river, however, the Barren Ground 
is only a mile or two away. When there are caribou on the Barren 
Ground we much prefer to hunt them there, for with the aid of one's 
field glasses they are easily discovered, and stalking caribou without 
woods for cover is an easy enough thing for one who knows how. I 
therefore on three successive days made long hunts northeast and 
east and southeast into the Barren Ground, but without seeing any- 
thing except old tracks. Then I tried the forest to the west ; there 
were plenty of old tracks but none quite fresh. Apparently the band 
I had followed so half-heartedly a few days before was the last band 
to visit those parts, and I now came to a not very comforting realiza- 
tion of the fact that I had allowed a few chafed toes to deter me from 
following up our only chance to replenish our failing stores of food 



136 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

in our home district. All the old tracks were going south, and it 
was evident that if we wanted to get meat we would have to go south 
too. It was now that I began to feel keenly the absence of Dr. 
Anderson and Natkusiak, the two dependable men of our party. 
Of those whom we had with us Kunasluk was too old and decrepit 
anyway, and Ilavinirk was seriously ill as the result of his hard 
experiences of the last month. Palaiyak, although a bright and will- 
ing boy, lacked self-reliance and was entirely inexperienced as a 
hunter. 

One has to do with what there is, however, and on December 
17th I set out to the south with Palaiyak and Pannigabluk. The 
plan was that we would follow Horton River south for a day and 
then strike west along the branch of the Horton known to us as West 
River, and follow wherever it led, with the idea that we might 
find caribou and possibly even moose. Their business was to travel 
upstream along the fairly smooth river ice and make camp on the 
river bank when twelve or fifteen miles had been covered, wliile I 
would hunt on top of the hill parallel to the river during day and when 
the hunting twilight was over at night I would pick up their trail 
in the river bottom and follow it to camp. It was one of our chief 
troubles that the hunting light was insufficient. The sun had been 
long gone, of course, but on a clear day there was light enough for 
about three hours at noon for shooting or for reading a newspaper out 
of doors (if we had had a newspaper). On a cloudy day, however, 
and especially when there was snow falling, there was practically 
no shooting light whatever. 

The first day of this journey, and also the second, I hunted to no 
purpose, although toward evening of the second day we met with some 
encouragement in finding the old tracks of a moose. That evening, 
however, Pannigabluk was taken sick and we were therefore unable 
to move camp. So far as the hunting went, that did not make much 
difference, for the country south of West River was unknown to me 
as yet, and I employed the time in exploring it. It snowed thickly 
that day and I found neither deer nor the signs of any. 

That evening when I came home I found that Palaiyak also, as 
well as Pannigabluk, was sick. Evidently it was the diet that was 
telling on them. On our journey up river from the sea we had lived 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 137 

on oil straight, and we had eaten so much of it that by the time we 
reached our camp we had only a pint or two left in a bag of oil that 
should, under ordinary circumstances, have lasted us for several 
months. The meat we had was all lean ; we had therefore for some 
time been living on a diet of exclusively lean meat, which had ag- 
gravated the diarrhoea from which Ilavinirk suffered and which 
had now brought down my two companions. 

Evidently, with two invalided out of three, it was not possible for 
us to proceed farther with our hunt, and we decided to return home. 
It was not only the illness of my companions that prompted this, 
but also the belief that Dr. Anderson and Natkusiak must surely 
have arrived by now, and I felt that with them to help me, the chances 
of success in the hunt to the south would be immeasurably greater. 

On our return home, however, there was no sign of Anderson, 
which caused us vv^orry of two sorts ; for something must have gone 
wrong with him to keep him away so long, and something was likely 
to go wrong with us, if he did not come back, with only one able 
hunter to take care of seven people and six dogs in a country which 
the caribou seemed to have temporarily abandoned. And the tan- 
talizing thing was to feel that the caribou could not be far away and 
that if we only had one or two able-bodied men to make up a sled 
party we were sure to overtake them. Inaction was not to be 
thought of, however, and Ilavinirk, although he was sick, realized 
this as keenly as I did, so he urged that we make another attempt to 
hunt upstream, in which he himself and Palaiyak would follow the 
river, making camps for me, while I hunted the east bank of the river 
into the Barren Ground, as I had hunted the west bank through the 
forest on the first attempt made with Pannigabluk and Palaiyak. 

On January 22d I happened to think that Natkusiak had, two 
months before, set some dead-fall traps and baited them with 
pieces of blubber. I now revisited these traps and found that in 
some of them the blubber bait was still there. I picked these up and 
brought them home, and that evening all of us had some fat along 
with our meat, which did us a considerable amount of good. 

December 24th Ilavinirk, Palaiyak, and I set out on our hunt 
upstream. On the first day, only a few miles southeast of our home 
camp I came upon the tracks of caribou, and half an hour later 



138 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

I saw them grazing quietly about a mile east of the bank of Horton 
River. I did then the sort of foolishly conservative thing one is 
liable to do in an emergency — I decided not to take the responsi- 
bility of approaching these caribou alone, but to go and fetch Ila- 
vinirk, with the idea that the two of us would be twice as sure as one 
to get them. This is just what I should not do now, for my experi- 
ence has taught me since that you must take whatever chance offers, 
for you can never be sure that a second chance will present itself. 
I spent an hour of precious daylight in fetching Ilavinirk, and when we 
came back to where the caribou had been they were gone, and Ila- 
vinirk himself was so spent with the running and the excitement 
that it was hard work for him to get back to the river again, unaided, 
where Palaiyak alone was pitching camp. 

When we had seen that the caribou were gone from the place 
where I had seen them, Ilavinirk had gone back to camp alone, say- 
ing that he thought he had strength to do that but had not strength 
for anything more ; and I spent another half hour in looking for the 
animals, at the end of which time it was already too dark to shoot. 
There was nothing for it but to go back to camp and try the next 
day. It is human nature to cry over spilt milk, and I slept little that 
night, thinking of the opportunity which I had foolishly let slip 
through my fingers. One of the features of Eskimo character is 
that they are far less liable than we to the tendency of indulging in 
vain regrets, or of saying, "I told you so," at every opportunity; 
and although Ilavinirk was sick, he spoke cheerfully of the probabil- 
ity of my finding these caribou again the next morning and getting 
them all. 

The next day turned out to be an ideal day for hunting. The 
sky was clear to give us a maximum amount of light, and the wind 
was blowing about fifteen miles an hour, which is sufiicient to keep 
the caribou from hearing you as you try to approach them up the 
wind. As always^ at this time of year we got up about four 
hours before daylight, and an hour before daylight I was on the 
road. The first gray of the dawn appeared about 7.30, and by 
8.30 I was sitting on top of the highest hill in the neighborhood of 
where the caribou had been seen, and was looking around with my 
excellent glasses in the hope of seeing the animals by the first 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 139 

light. It was not clear enough for seeing much, nor for shooting, 
until about ten o'clock. By then I could be sure that no caribou 
were near, within the field of vision of my glasses, so the next thing 
was to pick up the trail of the evening before and follow it wherever 
it led. I had the trail by 10.30, and by eleven I had seen the car- 
ibou, which had moved only a little way from where they had been 
the evening before, and were now grazing upon the slope of a hill not 
more than two miles from the post of look-out, from which I had 
been searching the skyline for two hours with my field glasses. 
They had been hidden by the crest of a hill. 

I did now what I should have done the day before — approached 
the animals directly, got within two hundred and fifty yards and 
secured them all. They turned out to be two young bulls and a cow 
with a calf. I did not stop to skin them, but covered them hastily 
with snow so as to prevent their freezing quickly, and made for the 
river as fast as I could, hoping to overtake Ilavinirk before he had 
moved camp far ; for we had agreed in the morning before I left that 
he was to proceed up river on the presumption that I would be 
unsuccessful in the day's hunt and get as far south as possible, — 
we thought the farther south we got, the better our prospects. 

Ilavinirk had gone about the programme energetically, and it was 
only after about ten miles of hard running that I overtook him getting 
ready to pitch camp in the mouth of a small creek. Daylight was 
gone and both Ilavinirk and Palaiyak were played out, so that we had 
to camp where we were and take the chance of wolverines and wolves 
stealing our precious meat during the night. The next day, when we 
went to fetch the meat, we found that a wolverine had eaten up a 
portion of one of the caribou. We shot the wolverine, and as its meat 
was much fatter and juicier than the caribou meat, it paid us well 
for the little it had stolen. 

Our hunt had begun well. There is a saying that "well begun 
is half done." In our case well begun was four fifths done, for another 
week of hunting gave us only one caribou, which I shot by moonlight 
one early morning — the only caribou I have ever shot by moon- 
light, although since then I have killed more than one wolf by night. 

This hunt, like the one before, I broke up rather sooner than I 
otherwise might, with the idea that Anderson must surely have- 



140 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

returned by now and that I would get him and Natkusiak to help 
me. Considering how sick and weak he was, Ilavinirk's conduct at 
this time was worthy of the highest admiration, but of course he 
could not do the work of a well man. We had hunted south about 
forty miles without finding the caribou there any more numerous 
than they were near home. Our return journey took us two days, 
and we got home on the evening of January 5th, to find that Ander- 
son had not yet arrived. 

On the days between December 28, 1909, and January 8, 1910, 
there are no entries in my diary, for on every one of those days I was 
off hunting during the hours of daylight and we had no light in the 
house at night by which diary entries could be written. We had now 
been nearly a month without oil or fat of any kind, either for food or 
for light. But on Januarj^ 8th the women, after gathering together 
all the old bones and breaking them up, had succeeded in boiling 
a little tallow out of them, and by its light I made the diary entries 
for the past ten days from memory, while the women mended clothes 
and did other sewing they had been unable to do before for want of 
light. 

Of our entire seven I was now the only one not actually sick, 
and I felt by no means well. Doing hard work in cold weather on a 
diet nearly devoid of fat is a most interesting and uncommon experi- 
ment in dietetics, and may therefore be worth describing in some 
detail. The symptoms that result from a diet of lean meat are 
practically those of starvation. The caribou on which we had to 
live had marrow in their bones that was as blood, and in most of 
them no fat was discernible even behind the eyes or in the tongue. 
When we had been on a diet of oil straight, a few weeks before, we 
had found that with a teacupful of oil a day there were no symptoms 
of hunger ; we grew each day sleepier and more slovenly, and no doubt 
lost strength gradually, but at the end of our meals of long-haired 
caribou skin and oil we felt satisfied and at ease. Now with a diet 
of lean meat everything was different. We had an abundance of it 
as yet and we would boil up huge quantities and stuff ourselves 
with it. We ate so much that our stomachs were actually distended 
much beyond their usual size — so much that it was distinctly 
noticeable even outside of one's clothes. But with all this gorging 




Mud Volcano between Darnley Bay and Langton Bay. 




Our Camp, Langton Bay, in Summer (1911). 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 141 

we felt continually hungry. Simultaneously we felt like unto burst- 
ing and also as if we had not had enough to eat. One by one the 
six Eskimo of the party were taken with diarrhoea. 

By the 10th of January things were getting to look serious indeed. 
It was apparent not only that we could not go on indefinitely without 
fat, but it was also clear that even our lean meat would last only a 
few days longer. We had on December 11th estimated that we had 
two months' supplies of meat, and now in a month they were gone. 
Our estimate had not been really wrong, for if we had had a little 
fat to go with the meat, it would no doubt have lasted at least sixty 
days, but without the fat we ate such incredible quantities that it 
threw all our reckoning out of gear. It was not only that we ate so 
much, but also the dogs. They had been fed more meat than dogs 
usually get and still they were nothing but skin and bones, for they 
could not, any more than we, get along on lean meat only. 

The caribou in the neighborhood were increasing in numbers 
now and I saw them almost every day, but I had the most outrageous 
luck. One day, for instance, I saw a band in clear, calm weather ; it 
was one of those deathly still days when the quietest step on the 
softest snow can be heard by man or beast for several hundred yards. 
As the animals were quiet I did not dare to attempt approaching them, 
thinking that the next day might be cloudy or windy or in some 
way more suitable to deer-stalking, for it is a noticeable fact that 
even though the day be practically still, the condition of the air 
when the sky is clouded is such as to muffle any noise and to make 
the approach to deer within, say, a hundred yards feasible. The next 
day was windy, but altogether too windy, for it was one of those blind- 
ing blizzards when it is impossible to see more than forty or fifty feet. 
Because our condition was desperate, I nevertheless hunted that day 
and walked back and forth over the place where the caribou had 
been the day before, knowing that it was possible, although unlikely, 
that I might fall in with the animals. I did not fall in with them, 
however, and the next day was a blizzard of the same kind and my 
hunt had the same result. The third day Ilavinirk and I went 
out together and found the caribou still, strange to say, in the 
same spot, but a half mile or so before we came up to them a fawn 
suddenly appeared on the top of a hill near us and saw us. It is 



142 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the nature of a frightened caribou to run toward any caribou that 
are in the neighborhood and to frighten them away also, so that 
there was nothing for us to do but to shoot this fawn, although we 
knew that the shooting would scare the large band away, which it 
did. 

January 11th Ilavinirk and I were again out looking for caribou. 
He used to accompany me in the morning on the chance of our see- 
ing something near home, but as his strength did not allow a long 
day's hunt he would return early while I went on as much farther as 
the daylight allowed. On this day we saw simultaneously to the 
north of us a caribou on top of one hill and three men on top of 
another hill. These must be Anderson, Natkusiak, and Pikaluk, 
we thought, and evidently they were hunting the same caribou that 
we saw. It was one of those still days, however, so that the chance 
of shooting him was not great for either party. We headed towards 
the caribou and so did the three men, but the caribou ran away 
long before we got near it. 

It turned out that these three men were not the ones we had 
expected, however, but three Eskimo, one of whom, Memoranna, 
is well known under the name of Jimmie to those who have read 
Amundsen's account of the Northwest Passage voyage. The others 
were Okuk, a Baillie Islands man, and a Mackenzie River "boy," 
Tannaumirk, who was really about twenty-five years of age but who 
has an appearance and a disposition that preclude his being con- 
sidered as grown up. They had come the 200-mile journey from 
the Baillie Islands to visit us with the hope of being able to get some 
caribou skins for clothing. They had had no particular luck so 
far in their hunts, but they had with them a little seal oil which they 
immediately offered to share with us. That night, therefore, we 
had lights again in our house and plenty of oil to eat. It was only a 
matter of two or three days from that time until all of us were in 
good form again. 




CHAPTER IX 

"EMORANNA was unable to tell us anything about Dr. 
Anderson, and now that our party was in fair health again 
I decided to go at once in search of him. We also needed 
to replenish our store of oil somehow, for the supply that Memo- 
ranna had brought with him was sufficient for a week or two only. 
There were three places where we had fat cached away ; the nearest 
was about thirty miles downstream, where we had covered up with 
stones the fat of three grizzly bears killed in the fall, amounting 
to about a hundred and twenty-five pounds; ten miles farther, at 
Langton Bay, was the fat of one grizzly bear, one polar bear, and 
about half of a bearded seal, all together something over two hundred 
pounds ; while at Cape Parry was the blubber which Dr. Anderson 
had gone to fetch, consisting of three or four hundred pounds that 
Captain Cottle had given us from the whale killed on the Banks 
Island voyage. 

I took with me the boy Palaiyak of our own party and engaged 
Tannaumirk of Memoranna's party to go with us. In three days 
we reached our first cache of blubber to find it thoroughly rifled by 
wolverines. A day farther north we found that at Langton Bay a 
wolverine had gnawed its way through a two-inch pine plank, had 
entered our storehouse and eaten all but fifteen or twenty pounds 
of the blubber. This wolverine had lived so well on our stores 
that he was the fattest animal of his species I have ever seen killed ; 
his meat was correspondingly good eating. 

We had found no traces of Dr. Anderson so far, except that we 
could see from the fact that certain articles were missing from Lang- 
ton Bay that his party had stopped there on the way north, but it 
was clear that they had not yet returned from Cape Parry. Because 
I was seriously worried for fear that some misfortune might have 
befallen him, and also because we had no other possible source of 
getting blubber, we had to continue north to Cape Parry. 

143 



144 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

I spent much time in speculations as to the possible reasons for 
Dr. Anderson's failure to return from Cape Parry, and some of 
these I recorded in my diary, so that it illustrates well my fluctuat- 
ing frame of mind. There were no new facts at hand one day beyond 
those which I had the day before, but still my opinion of what had 
probably happened varied materially from time to time, evidently 
for subjective reasons, for on evenings when I was sitting comfort- 
ably in camp writing up my diary after a sufficient supper, I was 
generally of the opinion that no doubt Dr. Anderson and his party 
would turn up safe and sound with some logical, although for the 
present unimaginable, excuse for their prolonged absence. At 
other times, when my physical condition and surroundings were not 
so satisfactory, I used to incline to the view that he or some of his 
party had probably gone too far to sea on a polar-bear hunt and had 
been carried off on drifting ice by an offshore wind ; or else one or 
more of the party might have sickened and the others might have 
stayed to take care of the invalids ; or possibly two might have been 
lost for one reason or another, and the third, being alone, might 
later on either have been frozen to death or might have decided that 
the safest thing was to remain where he was and try to make his liv- 
ing for the winter. Had Dr. Anderson been well and the others 
lost, I felt sure he would have tried to reach home, but my knowl- 
edge of Natkusiak's character led me to think that under similar 
circumstances he would probably make himself as comfortable as 
possible and wait for better weather and longer days for traveling. 
However, all of these things were soon to be settled, for it is a matter 
of three days' travel only from Langton Bay north to Cape Parry, 
where we were sure to find some traces of the party. 

January 21st we arrived at the cabin built by the wreck of the 
Alexander, where we had stored our belongings in the fall, and found 
it occupied by our entire party. It was a great relief to find them 
all there and a great surprise too, at the time. I never realized 
until I actually saw them how strong had been my inclination to 
expect that I would never see them again. But although they 
were all there, they were by no means well, for Dr. Anderson and 
Pikaluk were both in bed convalescing from pneumonia. They 
had had a pretty hard time. Pneumonia is a serious thing under 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 145 

any circumstances and especially in such a place as they were in, 
for not only was the house unsatisfactory, but the food at their 
disposal was not such as is suited to sick men. Ever since their 
convalescence had begun they had been hungering especially for fresh 
meat, and this was a place where no fresh meat was to be had, except 
a few foxes, for which Natkusiak trapped energetically. On an 
average he was getting about one fox per day. A stray caribou 
had wandered out upon the cape about Christmas time, and Natku- 
siak had secured him also, which was a great help to them. Pika- 
luk had been taken sick first, and Dr. Anderson had nursed him for a 
week, after which he was himself taken sick. 

It was clear that Dr. Anderson and Pikaluk would not be fit for 
traveling for a month at least, and there was immediate necessity 
that a sled go back to our people inland with a supply of blubber 
for them. I therefore dispatched Natkusiak and Palaiyak at once 
off inland, for now that I had found Dr. Anderson I did not care to 
leave him again while he was sick. Tannaumirk also stayed with 
us, for there was no special reason for his going inland. 

It was a fortunate thing that Dr. Anderson, since he was to be 
taken sick at all, should have been taken sick at Cape Parry, the one 
place where we had considerable provisions stored up against an 
emergency. My idea in buying flour and other things which formed 
our depot there had been that we should probably never need them, 
but I bought them as an insurance against emergency. I had not 
thought of the particular emergency which actually befell, but it 
seems, humanly speaking, that had it not been for this store of pro- 
visions, or had Dr. Anderson been taken ill anywhere else than in 
that neighborhood, the result would have been fatal, for the whole 
vicinity of Cape Parry is a poor country for game in winter in cer- 
tain seasons, and this happened to be one of the bad seasons. In 
other w^ords, when there are plenty of easterly or southeasterly winds, 
there is open water off the cape and it is a good hunting place both 
for seals and polar bears, but for this particular winter the winds 
were not strong enough to break away the ice, and bears and seals 
were not to be had. The supplies were calculated in the beginning 
to be equal to about three months' rations for four men, and it turned 
out that they were only just sufficient for carrying Dr. Anderson and 



146 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Pikaluk up to the time that they were so fully recovered as to be 
able to travel. 

The old house in which we were staying was about ten miles 
south from the tip of the cape proper, and as soon as the sick men were 
able to move we changed our camp location from there to the tip 
of the cape, with the idea that we would there have a better chance to 
get polar bears. Tannaumirk and I hunted every day, with the 
result that in a period of about six weeks I had a fleeting glimpse of 
one polar bear at a distance, and Tannaumirk killed one caribou. 

The circumstances of Tannaumirk's caribou killing bring to mind 
one of the common beliefs about Indians, Eskimo, and other prim- 
itive people. There are few misconceptions about them more prev- 
alent than the one that they have a sort of "sixth sense," which 
may be called the sense of direction or locality and which prevents 
them from being lost under any circumstances. This belief is par- 
ticularly strong among the whalemen who winter in the Arctic and 
who have seen much of the Eskimo on board ship only. There is 
a common saying at Herschel Island and elsewhere to the effect 
that "an Eskimo has a compass in his head." 

Tannaumirk saw the caribou in question early one morning, 
and went in pursuit of it. When I came home in the evening from 
my polar-bear hunt to seaward he had not yet returned When he 
finally got home it was late in the evening, and he brought with him 
the skin of the caribou and some meat. There was great rejoicing 
in camp and Tannaumirk was the hero of the hour. In the manner 
common to Eskimo, he recounted in great detail his various adven- 
tures that finally led up to the successful shooting. When the story 
had been told, I asked him, was it a long way to where the meat 
was, and had he cached it safely ? His answer was that he had cov- 
ered the meat with snow and set traps by it, and the place was a 
long way off. I volunteered to go with him the next morning to 
fetch the meat, but he said that it would not be necessary ; if he were 
to start early in the morning he would without assistance be able 
to get the meat and be home by night. Accordingly, bright and 
early the next day he was off with the sled and dogs. He was away 
all day and it had long been pitch dark and was well in the night 
before he returned. In answer to my questions he said that he had 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 147 

hurried all the time ; that it was a very long way ; and that he had 
hastily loaded the meat on the sled, set by the deerkill two addi- 
tional traps, making four all together, and had come right back home, 
the dogs trotting some of the way. 

The next day I remained in camp with Dr. Anderson and Pika- 
luk, while Tannaumirk was off somewhere setting fox traps. About 
noon Dr. Anderson heard dogs howling and called my attention to 
it. We went out-doors and could then hear plainly that several 
dogs were howling and whining on the other side of a ridge, about 
half a mile from camp. The situation was clear. Evidently Tan- 
naumirk had put some traps near the house and several of the dogs 
had been caught in them. Dr. Anderson was so well by now that he 
followed while I ran as fast as possible to get the dogs freed from 
the traps ; for at a temperature of anything like 40° below zero it 
takes but a sort while to freeze a paw that is pinched in a steel 
trap, and the best dog can be rendered valueless in half an hour 
through freezing if the jaws of the trap catch him well up on the 
paw and stop the circulation into the toes. 

When we got across the hill from behind which the howls were 
coming we found what we expected in that four of our dogs were 
caught in traps ; but what we had not expected to find was that this 
was the deerkill where Tannaumirk the day before had shot the 
caribou. What had happened was this : when the caribou had 
approached near the house and Tannaumirk had seen it, he had 
started after it and had followed it through a circle of over ten 
miles without noting at all in what direction the animal was going, 
and he had finally succeeded in approaching and killing it when it 
was scarcely more than a quarter of a mile away from our house, 
behind the nearest hill. After skinning and cutting up the animal, 
Tannaumirk, with no idea of how far from camp he was, had started 
back over the ten miles of his old trail which eventually led him 
home, of course ; and the following morning when he set out with 
the dogs to fetch the meat he had again gone the ten miles over the 
old trail, and had gone over it the fourth time in returning, never 
discovering that the place he went ten miles to reach was less than 
half a mile from home. 

Through long experience with Eskimo and Indians I have gath- 



148 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

ered a number of anecdotes of this sort, and a number of similar ones 
I have obtained second-hand from others whose experience with the 
Indians is more extensive than mine. The fact is that most people 
who deal with Indians deal with them in their own country, over 
which the Indian has hunted since boyhood, until he knows every 
stick, every stone, and every creek-bed, whether he sees them in the 
daylight or stumbles upon them in the dark. To a man unfamiliar 
with this locality who accompanies the Indian, it seems next to mirac- 
ulous how easily the Indian finds his way about, but there is nothing 
of the miraculous about it. For an Indian to recognize a rock that 
stands a mile and a half from his camp requires no other gift than 
that by which the city dweller recognizes the street corners in the 
neighborhood of his home. But take the Indian or the Eskimo 
out of his habitual surroundings, and he is, as a general thing, far 
the inferior of the white man in finding his way about. He has not 
the general principles to guide him that are clear in the mind of the 
average white man, and this is one of the reasons why Indians and 
Eskimo alike are afraid to go into a strange country, and why every 
white man who wants to accomplish anything in the exploration of 
such districts as the Barren Grounds of North America must be 
his own guide and that of his party as soon as they get beyond the 
Indian's familiar haunts. 

Most white men, even those of slight education, have a knowl- 
edge of the properties of angles, so that a white hunter who goes 
seven miles south, then three miles east, then four miles southwest, and 
two miles northwest, will have a fairly definite idea of how to draw a 
line that will take him thence to his original starting point. The 
Indian or Eskimo in my experience will have no such notion, and in- 
stead of going straight home will go back over the route by which he 
came, unless there are some landmarks in sight which he recognized 
earlier in the day. In December, 1910, for instance, when we were 
traveling along Horton River in a district unknown to my companion, 
Natkusiak, — who, by the way, is the best of all Eskimo hunters that 
I have known, — he was away from camp two days in the pursuit and 
killing of some caribou. When he came to camp he reported to 
me that he would have to go upstream about ten miles, which meant 
south in that case, until he would be opposite the place where the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 149 

meat was. He would then have to go on top of the hill to the east 
of the river and it would take him the larger part of the day to go 
to the deerkill, and it would be only the next day he could return. 
He went off early in the morning, going south ; in the afternoon, 
while sitting on a hill three miles east of our camp spying out the 
country with my glasses for caribou, I saw a sled coming from the 
south. At jQrst this astonished me very much, for I had no sleds 
to expect in that country except our own. And sure enough, it was 
our own sled and Natkusiak coming almost directly toward me. 
I headed him off and found that he was following his own trail of 
the day before by which he had come home, which was also the 
trail of the day earlier yet when he was following the caribou which 
he eventually killed. It turned out that he had shot the caribou 
about four miles northeast of our camp and that he had gone some- 
thing like twenty-five miles out of his way to follow the trail by 
which he had come home. So much for the idea of the Eskimo 
having a compass in his head. 

Commonly "primitive" people are supposed to have certain 
mental qualities, designated as "instinctive," through which they 
vastly excel us along certain lines ; and to make up for this excellence 
they are supposed to be far our inferiors in certain other mental 
characteristics. My own observations incline me to believe that 
there are no points in which they, as a race, are any more inferior to 
us than might be expected from the environment under which they 
have grown up from childhood; and neither have they any points 
of superiority over the white man, except those which are developed 
directly by the environment. Of course an Eskimo can find his way 
about in the wilderness better than the city dweller or the sailor, 
but he is likely to fall behind the white man of experience in just 
about the proportion you would expect from knowing the greater 
advantages of training in logical thinking which the white man 
has had. The European who keeps his head and looks about him 
can, in a year, pick up all the essentials of the lore of the open country. 

Very much to his surprise Dr. Anderson had discovered, a few 
days before he became ill, that Captain Wolki's schooner, the Rosie 
H., was wintering behind the Booth Islands, an easy half-day's journey 
from Cape Parry. The Rosie H. was not abundantly fitted out with 



150 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

anything, and still it was a source of material comfort to us to know 
that she was there, for we could have fallen back on her in case of 
extreme need. It was due to certain of Dr. Anderson's tempera- 
mental traits, and to the possession of similar ones by Natkusiak, 
that Captain Wolki, although only some ten miles away, had 
remained in ignorance for a month of the hard straits in which •- ^ 
party were. After my coming up I paid a visit to the Rosie n., 
and got roundly scolded in Dr. Anderson's stead for allowing such 
things to happen. Had they known of Dr. Anderson's predicamen''" 
they would have done for him all they could. But now we were 
happily through the worst of the trouble. 

By the beginning of March Dr. Anderson and Pikaluk were so 
completely recovered that they volunteered to make the six days' 
trip south to Langton Bay for the purpose of depositing there the 
sled load of ammunition and other necessities. It was our intention, 
then, by the 10th of March to proceed inland from Langton Bay 
where we had wintered and to strike across country thence to the 
northeast corner of Bear Lake, with the purpose of thereafter work- 
ing north in the summer down the Coppermine River until we should 
meet Eskimo. We know now that this would not have been a good 
plan to follow; it was made impractical by the arrival, March 6th, 
of Ilavinirk and others of the inland party. 

Ilavinirk's party told a tale of hardships and starvation rather 
worse than anything through which we had been previously. It 
had taken Natkusiak and Palaiyak a long time to reach them with 
the sled load of blubber. I had explained to Natkusiak when he 
started from Cape Parry that there was every need for hurry, for 
Ilavinirk's and Memoranna's parties had had practically nothing 
to eat when I left them. But Natkusiak could not realize that there 
was any real danger, and I do not think that there would have been 
any danger had Natkusiak been in Ilavinirk's place. As it was, 
however, instead of hurrying, Natkusiak stopped here and there on 
the way, in one place to catch fish because he had been so long without 
fish, and in another place to set traps because the trapping was good. 
Meantime Ilavinirk's and Memoranna's parties had had hard luck 
in hunting. There were caribou in the country, but the weather 
was continually bad and their management was not the best. The 




RosiE H." IN Winter Quarters. 




Wreck of Steam Whaler "Alexander." 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 151 

little food left on hand when I went away soon disappeared, and then 
followed the larger zoological specimens which I had preserved for 
Dr. Anderson in the fall. There were nine skins of caribou of both 
sexes and all ages, which I had taken off carefully with heads, horns, 
and leg bones, making also careful record of the measurements. 
These specimens were of great scientific value, for they represented 
in all probability a new variety of caribou, or if not that, at least 
caribou from a district where none had previously been taken for 
scientific purposes. One of these specimens especially was a rare 
thing. I have been present at the killing of a thousand caribou, 
and in all that number I have seen only three that were hornless 
in a season when they should have had horns. In other words, 
I have seen only three caribou upon the heads of which horns were 
destined never to grow. One of these I had carefully skinned for 
Dr. Anderson. In this period of scarcity the head of this rare muley 
caribou went for food along with the other scientific skins. The 
heads of all these animals and the leg bones went first and then the 
skins themselves, as well as other skins which we had intended for 
clothing. 

It was a period of scarcity not only among the human beings of 
that district but also among the wolves, all of which were skin poor 
and two of which died of starvation near our house at a place where 
their carcasses were found afterwards and eaten by our Eskimo. 
Pannigabluk was the only member of our party to whom wolf meat 
was taboo. The rest of us considered wolf, under ordinary circum- 
stances, to be excellent eating. In summer when they are fat and 
caribou poor, all of us much preferred wolf meat to caribou. But 
those who tasted them were unanimous in saying that the wolves 
that died of starvation were no delicacy. 

When Natkusiak finally arrived at the camp on Horton River, 
the tide had just been turned by Memoranna's success in caribou 
hunting. From that time everything had gone well, but the two 
periods of starvation in one winter, which were the first of his entire 
life, had proved too much for Ilavinirk and his family, for they now 
came to me and told me that they felt sure that if we went farther 
east the coming spring, things would go still worse with them. In 
fact, they would not go east with me and had made up their minds 



152 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

to quit our service and go back to the Mackenzie River, where there 
was plenty of fish, where tea and tobacco could be had, and where 
they could attend church service now and then. 

These were rather critical days for us, for we had now been in the 
North two years without as yet being able to make an attempt to 
reach the country in which our goal was placed, — the country 
which might possibly contain Eskimo who had never seen a white 
man and which certainly was unknown to science and needed inves- 
tigation. The situation had to be dealt with carefully, and I began 
by separating Natkusiak from the rest of the crowd and getting him 
to agree with me that the starvation of the past winter would in 
neither case have occurred but for the sickness and incompetence 
of members of our party, which were adventitious circumstances 
and could with reasonable care be eliminated in the future. 

As a general thing the desire for adventure is foreign to the 
Eskimo race. They do not care to go over the mountain for the 
sake of finding out what there may be on the other side — • they will 
go only if the prospect for hunting seems better there than here. But 
Natkusiak was the one individual I have known among his people 
who seemed to have a slight rudiment of the spirit of the adventurer 
and investigator, who likes to see things because they are new, 
irrespective of what may be called their commercial value. 

I got him, therefore, to agree that he was still willing to proceed 
eastward with me, and I then told Ilavinirk that all I would ask 
him to do would be to stay at Langton Bay for a year and take care 
of our base there. I showed him that we were much better situated 
this year than last, for last year we had arrived at Langton Bay only 
in the late fall and had thus been prevented from taking advantage 
of the summer hunting season, and that now if I left him there, 
with nothing to do but hunt, the chances were that he would have 
an abundance of food and valuable skins laid up against the winter. 
Dr. Anderson would meantime make a trip to the Mackenzie River 
to get our mail and any supplies he might be able to secure from 
whalers, as well as ammunition and photographic apparatus which 
the American Museum of Natural History intended to send us. 
We pointed out to Ilavinirk that the whaling industry was, so far 
as we knew, on its last legs, and there was no guarantee that any 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 153 

ship would come to Herschel Island. And if none came, the Her- 
schel Island people would be worse off than we were at Langton 
Bay, because there is less game around Herschel Island. After 
several days of argument Ilavinirk was finally convinced, and 
announced himself willing to stay at Langton Bay if Dr. Anderson 
would go west to Herschel Island and try to secure tea, and other 
things which the Eskimo consider necessities, from any whaling 
ships that might come in. 

This was in general for us a winter of misfortunes, perhaps the 
most serious of which, in its effect upon our plans, was the loss of more 
than half of our dogs and most of the best ones. We had had twenty- 
three in the fall, besides several that belonged to our Eskimo, and 
now there were ten left all together. Of these I would have to take 
six at least for my trip to the eastward, and Ilavinirk could hardly 
get along with less than the remaining four around Langton Bay, 
for a man cannot do successful hunting without a sled for moving 
camp. Dr. Anderson therefore had no dogs with which to make 
his thousand-mile trip to Herschel Island and back. Memoranna 
was going west, however, and volunteered to take Dr. Anderson's 
small baggage on his sled and to let Dr. Anderson accompany him 
as far as the eastern edge of the Mackenzie delta — where our whale- 
boat had been cached by Dr. Anderson's party the fall before and at 
which point he would endeavor to hire an Eskimo to help him sail 
the boat to Fort Macpherson, and thence to Herschel Island. The 
idea was that if any whaling ship came in, Dr. Anderson would board 
it at Herschel Island and be brought east by it to Cape Bathurst ; 
but if none came in, he would work his way eastward in the boat as 
far as possible during the summer, and would come afoot the rest of 
the way to join Ilavinirk in the early winter at the latest. 

Pursuant of all these plans we moved south to Point Stivens, 
about ten miles north of Langton Bay, a place known to the Eskimo 
as Okat, which, being translated, means "Codfish," or rather "Tom- 
cod." There is a bight behind Point Stivens where tomcod can be 
hooked in unbelievable numbers at almost any time in winter. We 
spent several days here, and each member of the party who applied 
himself to the fishing was able to haul out several hundred tomcod 
per day, so that it was not long until we had about a ton of fish. 



154 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

When this was accomphshed, Memoranna loaded up his sled with 
all the fish it would carry, and Ilavinirk his sled also ; for he was to 
accompany Dr. Anderson as far as the mouth of the Horton River, 
with the view of recovering some tents, traps, ammunition, and other 
things which we had abandoned about thirty miles upstream on 
Horton River, at the time that we ran short of food on our journey 
up that river in December. 

During the last days together, Dr. Anderson and I had frequent 
long talks about the prospects of the coming year — which were 
none of the brightest. We had suffered sickness with its conse- 
quences of delay, starvation, and the growth of discontent and worry 
for the future among our Eskimo. There had been accidents 
from causes beyond human control, and our best dogs had sickened 
and died. The aggregate effect of these things was depressing, but 
Dr. Anderson quite agreed with me that our plans had to be carried 
out, irrespective of whether or not we had good excuse for failing, 
for failure can never be so excused as to be the equivalent of success. 
We had been two years gone from New York, and the Eskimo 
uncontaminated by civilization were still as problematic as when 
we left home, but we had faith that they were somewhere along the 
coast less than three hundred miles to the east, and the time had 
come to go and find them. 

We both felt that my journey to the eastward might turn out 
seriously because of the handicap we were under. W^e still had faith 
to believe that a white man can live on the country wherever an 
Eskimo can do so ; but we did not know for certain that there were 
any Eskimo where we were going, for no one had ever — so far as 
I know — seen Eskimo on the mainland shore between Cape Parry 
and Cape Krusenstern, a stretch of coast which, as has been said, 
the Baillie Islands people believed destitute of game. As Dr. Ander- 
son would have to take action and to answer questions in case we 
failed to return, I gave him written memoranda of what my plans 
were, gave him a date up to which he need not worry for our safety, 
and told him what efforts I should count on his making to reach me 
in case we overstayed our time-limit, which I put at about nine 
months. 

It was March 14th that Dr. Anderson left for the west, accom- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 155 

panying Memoranna. We who remained behind at Okat kept 
on fishing for a day or two after that in the same routine way; 
and then it occurred to me that it was worth while to look for 
caribou to the east, for while tomcod are excellent eating when 
there is nothing else to be had, the}^ are not quite so good as the next 
poorest kind of thing when there is any choice. Following their 
natural bent, my companions considered such a thing as looking 
for caribou here ridiculous, for they had never heard any one say 
that caribou had ever been seen in this neighborhood. 

The country for six or eight miles southeast is a dead level, but 
beyond that there are rolling hills, the edge of which I had no sooner 
reached than I saw caribou in all directions, in bands ranging from 
three to ten. In fact, it is likely that I should have had better success 
than I did, had there not been quite so many, for as I was approach- 
ing seven that were grazing on a hillside I suddenly walked into 
four that were lying in a hollow between me and the other band. 
They ran off at a great rate, so that I got only one of them, and by 
their running they scared the other band. I followed them for a 
while, but darkness came on, and I had to be content with the one 
animal secured at the first shot. 

On my way home from this hunt a blizzard came up. There is 
no danger to life from a blizzard as long as you keep your head. The 
reason that so many white men freeze to death in the North is chiefly 
another one of their superstitions about cold which runs to this effect : 
that when, you are caught in a storm without shelter you must keep 
moving continually, because if you stop and sit down, and especially 
if you go to sleep, you are sure to freeze to death. The Eskimo 
rule, which is exactly the opposite of this, is a sensible one. Just 
as soon as you make up your mind that you are lost, stop ; and don't 
move until you know where you are going. A white man, follow^ing 
his principle, will walk about until he is thoroughly exhausted and 
usually until his clothes are wet with perspiration. The time finally 
comes when he has to stop through weariness and sleepiness, and his 
powers of resistance have then been brought to so low a verge that 
freezing to death is the common, and in fact the nearly universal, 
outcome. 

Of course, the best thing when you are lost in a winter storm is 



156 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

to put up a snow house, but that is sometimes impossible, either 
because a man does not know how, or else because the snow is too 
soft and cannot be cut into blocks. The thing to do then is to find 
a small stone or a piece of sod or anything else that can be brushed 
dry of snow to sit on. Sit on this with your back turned toward 
the wind ; rest your head on your knees and go to sleep if you can. 
Sleeping will help you to pass the time away and there is no danger 
in it, for as soon as you begin to get cold the chill will wake you up — 
always provided your clothes are dry and that you are not exliausted 
before you sit down. 

Being struck by a blizzard in a dead level country is a serious 
thing, because you will have difficulty in finding home, and because 
it is such a nuisance, even though perfectly safe, to have to sleep 
out in a blizzard. Still people differ about this temperamentally. 
Natkusiak, for instance, seemed to enjoy being caught in such a 
storm ; and we have sometimes found no more than two or three miles 
from camp a snow house in which he had slept overnight, when a 
man of a different temperament would almost certainly have found 
home. My own inclination is always to try to get into a comfort- 
able camp, although I am at all times prepared to take the alter- 
native and to sit down to wait for the storm to be over before getting 
tired or damp from sweat. 

This evening was one of the most difficult of my entire expe- 
rience on account of the levelness of the country. Our house stood 
on an island with a cutbank about a quarter of a mile long and so 
I knew that if I could hit the neighborhood of the house within an 
area of not more than a quarter of a mile, there was a fair chance of 
finding the camp. It was chiefly a chance, no doubt, but as a matter 
of fact I found the cutbank and got home about four hours after 
dark, much to the surprise of the Eskimo and also to their delight, 
seeing that I brought a caribou tongue, which was not only a deli- 
cacy but also an advertisement of the fact that the reign of the tom- 
cod was over. Two days later we moved camp about ten miles 
southeast to the east end of Langton Bay, from v/hich we hunted 
caribou with such success that within a week we had seventeen 
carcasses piled up outside our tent. 

On one of his caribou hunts from this camp, Natkusiak was 



MT LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 157 

caught by just such a bUzzard as that in which I had been about a 
week before, and was away for two days. A man fully dressed at 
this season of the year wears two coats, — a thick outer one and an 
inner one made of thin fawnskin. Natkusiak on this occasion was 
wearing only the thin fawnskin one, and we were therefore consider- 
ably worried about him ; but on the third morning he came home all 
safe and smiling, saying that he had had the longest and best sleep 
of the winter. He had been about four miles away from camp, in 
a little snow hut, the floor of which was not over five feet in diam- 
eter and the roof of which was less than four feet high. 

During this time we had good success, not only with caribou 
but also in the trapping of foxes, the skins of which were valuable 
both commercially and for scientific purposes. As always at this 
season of the year, and during other seasons whenever the caribou 
are poor, we preferred the meat of the foxes to that of the caribou. 
I find a note in my diary to the effect that we ate all the foxes 
caught during this time, except one which we found dead from dis- 
ease, apparently, and there is a complaint set down to the effect that 
although the skin was in good condition, the flesh was too lean for 
eating. 

Ilavinirk returned from Horton River March 27th. All had 
been well with Dr. Anderson and Memoranna when he left them ; but 
his opinion was that they had not proceeded far as yet, for Memo- 
ranna had a cache of a dozen or more autumn-killed seals, halfway 
from Horton River to Cape Bathurst, and intended to stop there for 
a week or two trapping foxes. 

April 2d Natkusiak, Tannaumirk, and I started for the last trip 
to our cache at Cape Parry to get a few things for my projected 
journey eastward along the coast. We went all the way out to the 
Rosie H. at the Booth Islands for the purpose of bringing Captain 
Wolki a present of fresh deer meat. Wlien he heard that caribou 
were plenty east of Langton Bay, he decided at once to accompany 
us back. 

After a careful consideration of all the possibilities, I had come to 
realize the uncomfortable fact that Tannaumirk and Pannigabluk, 
besides Natkusiak and myself, were the best and the only party 
that could be organized for our projected journey into the unknown 



158 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

eastern country, Natkusiak was willing to go anywhere; Panni- 
gabluk did not care much where she went; and Tannaumirk was 
entirely disinclined to go but lacked the backbone to oppose me in 
anything that I wanted. Accordingly we divided the party at Cape 
Parry, and I told off Natkusiak, Pannigabluk, and Tannaumirk to 
haul, with five of the dogs, a sled load of such things as we needed for 
our eastward trip straight across Darnley Bay from Cape Parry to 
Cape Lyon ; while Pikaluk and myself, with our other five dogs, and 
Captain Wolki and one of his men, known throughout the whaling 
fleet as John the Sailmaker or Old John, accompanied us to Langton 
Bay. They had with them two sleds and an Eskimo couple. 

When we returned to our camp, Ilavinirk reported that the cari- 
bou were not so numerous as they had been and that he and Pa- 
laiyak had secured only five during our absence. Old John was 
unused to hunting, and Captain Wolki's Eskimo was neither ener- 
getic by nature nor in the best of health, so that the captain had to 
do all his own hunting. He went at it with determination, although 
suffering great pain in his feet from an attack of rheumatism. When 
it became apparent that his party was going to have no great success 
in the hunt, I gave him two sled loads of caribou meat, which he sent 
back to the ship. 

All together Captain Wolki secured only four caribou, but his 
hunting April 14th brought out the interesting fact that the grizzly 
bears had wakened from their winter hibernation. The captain killed 
one of them on that day at the mouth of his hole, sldnned him, cut up 
the meat, packed it away in the hole, carefully covered it up with 
snow, and spent the next four days in a vain attempt to find it again. 
We were compelled to make the final start on our journey to the east- 
ward before the energetic captain had yet recovered the meat and val- 
uable skin, but I have heard since that he eventually found them. 




CHAPTER X 

LTHOUGH minutes are seldom of enough value with us in 
the North to waste ink in recording them, I have set down 
the fact that it was 1.45 on the afternoon of April 21st, 1910, 
that we finally made our long-planned start from Langton Bay on 
our trip towards Coronation Gulf. 

We were now fairly started for the unknown, but no one but 
myself was very enthusiastic over the enterprise. The reluctance 
of my people was due in part only (and in less part) to their fear of 
finding the unknown country gameless — they feared to find it 
inhabited by a barbarous and bloodthirsty race of which the Baillie 
Islands Eskimo had been telling us grotesque tales whenever our 
party and they came together. These dreaded people were the 
Nagyuktogmiut, the people of the caribou antler, who lived far to 
the east, and who used to come in semi-hostile contact with their 
ancestors long ago. 

"These people bear the name of the caribou antler," they had 
told us, "because of a peculiar custom they have. When a woman 
becomes of marriageable age her coming-out is announced several 
days in advance. At the appointed time she is made to take her 
place in an open space out-of-doors, and all the men who want wives 
form around her in a circle, each armed with the antler of a large 
bull caribou. The word is given, and , they all rush at her, each 
trying to hook her toward him with the antler. Often the woman 
is killed in the scrimmage, but if some one succeeds in getting her 
alive from the others he takes her for a wife. As strength and the 
skill which experience gives are the main requirements for success, 
some of the Nagyuktogmiut have a great many wives, while most of 
them have none. Because so many women are killed in this way 
there are twice as many men as women among them. We know 
many stories, of which this is one, to show what queer people these 
Easterners are. They also kill all strangers." That was the way 

159 



160 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

all stories of the Easterners ended. Like Cato's delenda est Car- 
thago, "they kill all strangers" were the unvarying words that fin- 
ished every discussion of the Nagyuktogmiut by the Baillie Islanders. 

No matter how fabulous a story sounds, there is usually a basis 
of fact ; when we at last got to these Easterners we found that the 
kernel of truth consisted in the fewness of women as compared with 
men, but the reason for this fact had nothing to do with caribou 
antlers, but was instead connected with the fact that they practice 
the Spartan custom of exposing new-born children, and especially 
female children, with the result that women among them are much 
fewer than men. 

When we finally made our start for the east we were in many 
respects poorly equipped for spending a year away from any possible 
source of supplies other than those which the Arctic lands themselves 
can furnish. When I had planned this undertaking in New York, 
I had counted on having good dogs, but the good dogs were now 
dead. I had counted on Dr. Anderson's company and cooperation, 
but necessity (chiefly the lack of ammunition for our rifles for the com- 
ing year) had dictated that he should go west for supplies, and that 
I should depend on Eskimo companions alone. I had counted on 
having a silk tent and other light equipment for summer use, and the 
lightest and most powerful rifles and high-power ammunition, but 
during one of our winter periods of shortage of food I had been com- 
pelled to abandon many of these things at a distance from which 
they could not now be got. Instead of the ten-pound silk tent, I 
therefore had to take a forty-pound canvas one, old and full of holes ; 
I had only two hundred rounds for my Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5 
mm. rifle, and had to piece out with far heavier and less powerful 
black-powder rifles and ammunition. In all we had four rifles of 
three different calibers, and a total of nine hundred and sixty rounds 
of three kinds of ammunition, when the right thing obviously is to 
have but one kind of rifle and ammunition. Had one of our rifles 
broken we should have had to throw away the ammunition suited 
to that gun. 

It is true that what is right in theory cannot be wrong in prac- 
tice, and still I fancy there are few men so sure of a theory that they 
are free from a bit of nervousness when they come to stake their 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 161 

lives on its holding good. When our little party of three Eskimo 
and myself were finally started for the east, they felt, and expressed 
it, and I felt, but tried to refrain from expressing it, that we had 
embarked on a serious venture. At Cape Lyon, April 27th, we left 
behind the farthest east point of the mainland upon which any of 
the American whalers are known to have landed, though some have 
cruised as far east as the western end of Dolphin and Union straits 
in summer, standing well offshore, of course, and never seeing any 
people. Cape Lyon is set down by Sir John Richardson, who coasted 
this shore in the twenties and again in the forties of the last century, 
as the eastern limit of former occupation by people who build per- 
manent earth and wood houses, after the manner of the Mackenzie 
Eskimo, and as, coincidently, the eastern limit of the bow-head 
whaling industry as carried on by the prehistoric Eskimo. We 
soon discovered to be a fact what we might have inferred, that it 
was Sir John's method of traveling — that of summer exploration 
by v/ater, when the boats usually stood well offshore — which had 
prevented his finding traces of permanent occupation. Following 
the coast as we did, we found every few miles the ruins of such per- 
manent whaling villages as we already knew from Alaska and the 
Mackenzie. If these were not actually inhabited at the time of Sir 
John's coasting voyage in 1826, they must have been then but recently 
abandoned. The most easterly house ruin actually seen by us was 
near the mouth of Crocker River, though others farther east are 
almost certain to have escaped us, as the snow was deep on the 
ground. Many ethnologists had considered that there was an area 
of isolation for two hundred or so miles east of Cape Parry, and that 
the Eskimo of the east and w^est had not had much contact with 
one another across this supposedly barren stretch ; our work has 
shown that while this may be true for the last hundred years at the 
most, it was not true farther back. We saw no reason to think that 
a hundred years ago this stretch of coast was any less thickly pop- 
ulated than any other stretch of the Arctic coast of America. 

We had with us on starting from Langton Bay about two weeks' 
supplies. These were neither here nor there as provisions for a 
year's exploration — we would have been quite as well off had we 
started with only two days' supphes. From the outset, therefore. 



162 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

we tried to provide each day food for that day from the animals of 
the land. In carrying out such a programme for a party of four 
each had to do his share. My main reliance was the Alaskan man 
Natkusiak, and the woman Pannigabluk; the Mackenzie River 
boy Tannaumirk, a boy in character, though perhaps twenty-five 
in years, was a cheerful and companionable sort of fellow, but with- 
out initiative and (like many of his countrymen nowadays) not in 
the best of health. Our general plan was that the three Eskimo 
took care of the sled, one, usually the woman, walking ahead to 
pick out a trail through the rough sea ice, and the other two steady- 
ing the sled from upsetting too often, and pulling in harness at the 
same time to help the dogs. If they saw a seal or a bear, one of them 
would go after him while the other two waited at the sled, cooked a 
lunch if it was near midday, or made camp if night was approaching. 
If by camp-time no game had yet been seen, the woman Pannigabluk 
would stay by the camp to cook supper, while the two men went off 
in different directions to hunt. That the two should go in different 
directions was wise, for it doubled the chances of seeing game, but 
it at times caused unnecessary waste of ammunition and the killing 
of more meat than was needed. The very first time that both men 
went out to hunt in this manner, for instance, Natkusiak killed two 
seven or eight hundred pound bearded seals in one shot, and Tan- 
naumirk a big, fat grizzly bear in four shots. This was meat enough 
for several weeks if we had (Eskimo fashion) stayed there to eat it 
up; traveling as we were, heavily loaded through rough ice, we 
could not take along more than a hundred pounds of meat. 

Although the Eskimo frequently killed an animal or two if they 
happened on them along the line of march, their chief business was 
getting the sled load as many miles ahead as convenient during the 
day, which was seldom over fifteen miles in a working day averag- 
ing perhaps eight hours. We were in no hurry, for we had no par- 
ticular distance to go and no reason to hasten back, but expected 
to spend the summer wherever it overtook us, and the winter simi- 
larly in its turn. 

My companions traveled along the coast, made camp, and cooked, 
while I took upon myself the main burden of the food-providing. 
With this in view I used to strike inland about five miles in the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 163 

morning, starting often a good while before the Eskimo broke camp, 
and then walking rapidly eastward parallel to the coast. With my 
snow-shoes I made easy and rapid progress compared to that of the 
sled along the coast, unless I happened on caribou. These had been 
in some numbers on the Parry peninsula before we left home. (We 
called the Langton Bay and Cape Parry district "home" for three 
years, for, no matter how many hundreds of miles of land and ice 
separated Dr. Anderson or me from it, we always had at least one 
Eskimo family there protecting what supplies we had and the scien- 
tific collections already made.) Crossing Darnley Bay on the ice, 
we had of course seen no caribou; at Cape Lyon the Eskimo saw 
one yearling, but were unable to get it; and at Point Pierce, five 
days out from Langton Bay, we were stopped by an easterly blizzard 
without having yet secured any. The Eskimo, who had "known" 
all along that we were going into a gameless country, felt sure that 
the fawn they had seen at Lyon was the most easterly member of 
the deer species inhabiting the coast ; it would, therefore, be wisdom 
to turn about now, they argued, before the road got too long for the 
back journey and we got too weak from hunger — all this over huge 
troughs of boiled meat and raw blubber of the seals killed two days 
before, on which we were gorging ourselves, for much eating was 
always our chief pastime when delayed by a blizzard that the dogs 
would not face. As a matter of fact, what my Eskimo really dreaded 
was not so much hunger as the possibility of our success in the quest 
of what to me were the scientifically interesting "people who had 
never seen a white man," but to them were the dreaded "Nagyuk- 
togmiut, so called because they hook to themselves wives with the 
antlers of bull caribou ; they kill all strangers.'' 

Generally it is only in times of extreme need that one hunts 
caribou in a blizzard — not that nine tenths of the blizzards in the 
Arctic need keep a healthy man indoors ; it is merely that the drift- 
ing snow (even when you can see as far as two hundred yards) di- 
minishes many times over the chance you have of finding game. If 
you do find caribou, however, the stronger the gale the better your 
chance of close approach without being seen, for these animals, though 
they double their watchfulness in foggy weather, seem to relax it in 
a blizzard. In the present instance my reason for looking for cari- 



164 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

boil was that I wanted to kill a few for the moral effect it would have 
on my party; for in the midst of abundance they would be forced 
to fall back on their fear of the Nagyuktogmiut as the only argu- 
ment for retreat, and this they were a bit ashamed of doing, even 
among themselves. It was therefore great luck for us, although we 
were in no immediate need of meat, that after a short hunt through 
the storm I ran into a band of seven cows and young bulls about 
five miles inland, southwest from Point Pierce. I came upon them 
quite without cover, but saw them through the drifting snow at 
three hundred yards before they saw me — the human eye is a great 
deal keener than that of the caribou, wolf, or any other animal with 
which I have had experience. By stepping back a few paces till 
the drifting snow had hidden the caribou again, and then guardedly 
circling them to leeward, I found a slight ridge which allowed safe 
approach to within about two hundred yards of where they had been. 
The main thing in stalking caribou that are not moving is the ability 
to keep in mind their location accurately while you are circling and 
winding about so as to approach them from a new direction behind 
cover of irregular hills and ridges that are of course unfamiliar to 
you. In this case my plans came suddenly to naught through the 
caribou appearing on the sky-line two hundred yards off. I shot 
three of them, though we could not possibly use more than the 
meat of one. The moral effect on my Eskimo of having food to 
throw away would, I knew, be invaluable to me. Had I killed only 
one, they would not have believed it to be for any reason other than 
that I was unable to kill more. This was the only time in a period 
of fourteen months of continuous "living on the country" that I 
shot more animals than I thought we should need, although I often 
had to kill a single large animal, such as a polar bear or bearded seal, 
when I knew we should be unable to haul with us more than a small 
part of its meat. 

We proceeded eastward along the deserted coast without adven- 
ture. "Blessed is that country whose history is uninteresting" 
applies to Arctic expeditions as well. Having an adventure is a 
sign that something unexpected, something unprovided against, has 
happened; it shows that some one is incompetent, that something 
has gone wrong. For that reason we pride ourselves on the fewness 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 165 

of our adventures ; for the same reason we are a bit ashamed of the 
few we did have. An adventure is interesting enough in retrospect, 
especially to the person who didn't have it ; at the time it happens 
it usually constitutes an exceedingly disagreeable experience. On 
May 2d, near Point Dease Thompson, through incompetence of 
my own, I came near having a serious one ; that I did not actually 
have it was due to the incompetence of a polar bear. After com- 
pletely outmaneuvering me at the start, he allowed a fondness for 
grandstand play to lose him the game at the critical moment. 

The thing happened in the afternoon. As usual, I was hunting 
caribou eastward along the sea-front of the Melville Mountains 
that lie parallel to the coast a few miles inland. The sled and the 
Eskimo were traveling more slowly along the coast and were several 
miles behind — for one thing, the sled was heavy and the ice rough ; 
for another, they used to stop an hour or so each day to cook a lunch 
at which I was seldom able to join them. I had seen no caribou all 
day nor the day before, and our meat was low ; therefore I stopped 
whenever I came to the top of a commanding hill to sweep the coun- 
try carefully with my binoculars. The land showed nothing but a 
white wolf or arctic fox now and then ; ptarmigan there were, but 
they are too small game for a party of four that is going to go a year 
on nine hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition ; the foxes, too, 
were beneath our notice, though their meat is excellent ; but a wolf 
that came within two hundred yards seldom got by me, for a fat one 
weighs a hundred pounds, and all of us preferred them at this season 
to caribou, except Pannigabluk, who would not taste the meat because 
it is taboo to her people. 

This day the wolves did not come near, and the first hopeful 
thing I saw was a yellow spot on the sea ice about three miles off. 
After watching it for five minutes or so I was still unable to deter- 
mine whether or not the spot was yellow ice or something else than ice ; 
had my party been abreast of me or ahead I should have given up 
and moved on, but as they were several miles behind I put in a half- 
hour watching this thing that was a bit yellower than ice should be ; 
now and then I looked elsewhere, for a caribou or grizzly may at any 
time come out from behind a hill, a polar bear from behind a cake of 
ice, or a seal out of his hole. After sweeping the entire circle of the 



166 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

horizon perhaps for the sixth time I noted that the yellow spot had 
disappeared — it was, therefore, a polar bear that had been lying 
down ; after sleeping too long in one position he had stood up and 
lain down again behind an ice cake. 

A moment after noting this I was running as hard as I could in 
the direction of the bear, for there was no telling how soon he would 
start traveling or how fast he would go. I had, as soon as I began 
to suspect the yellow spot might be a bear, taken careful note of the 
topography behind me with relation to the spot's position out on the 
rough sea ice, for it is as difficult to keep a straight line toward an 
invisible object among the ice cakes and pressure ridges as it is in a 
forest. The mountains behind, however, could always be seen, and 
by their configuration I tried to guide myself straight toward the 
bear. Every three or four hundred yards I would climb a high 
pressure ridge and have a look around with the glasses, but nothing 
was to be seen. I did not, in fact, expect to see anything unless the 
bear had commenced traveling, in which case he would perhaps 
expose himself by crossing a high ridge. When at last I got to the 
neighborhood of the animal, according to my calculations, I climbed 
an especially high ridge and spent a longer time than usual sweeping 
the surroundings with the glasses and studying individual ice cakes 
and ridges, with the hope of recognizing some of those I had seen from 
the mountains to be in the neighborhood of my bear ; but everything 
looked different on near approach, and I failed to locate myself 
to my own satisfaction. I had decided to go a quarter of a mile 
or so farther before beginning to circle in quest of the bear's tracks. 
My rifle was buckled in its case slung across my back, and I was 
slowly and cautiously clambering down the far side of a pressure 
ridge, when I heard behind me a noise like the spitting of a cat or 
the hiss of a goose. I looked back and saw, about twenty feet away 
and almost above me, a polar bear. 

Had he come the remaining twenty feet as quietly and quickly 
as a bear can, the literary value of the incident would have been lost 
forever; for, as the Greek fable points out, a lion does not write a 
book. From his eye and attitude, as well as the story his trail told 
afterward, there was no doubting his intentions : the hiss was merely 
his way of saying, "Watch me do it ! " Or at least that is how I 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 167 

interpreted It ; possibly the motive was chivalry, and the hiss was his 
way of saying Garde ! Whichever it was, it was the fatal mistake of 
a game played well to that point ; for no animal on earth can afford 
to give warning to a man with a rifle. And why should he ? Has 
a hunter ever played fair with one of them ? 

Afterward the snow told plainly the short — and for one of the 
participants, tragic — story. I had underestimated the bear's dis- 
tance from shore, and had passed the spot where he lay, going a 
hundred yards or two to windward ; on scenting me he had come up 
the wind to my trail, and had then followed it, walking about ten 
paces to leeward of it, apparently following my tracks by smelling 
them from a distance. The reason I had not seen his approach was 
that it had not occurred to me to look back over my own trail ; I 
was so used to hunting bears that the possibility of one of them 
assuming my own role and hunting me had been left out of consider- 
ation. A good hunter, like a good detective, should leave nothing 
out of consideration. 

On May 9th, nineteen days out from Langton Bay, we came upon 
signs that made our hearts beat faster. It was at Point Wise, where 
the open sea begins to be narrowed into Dolphin and Union straits 
by the near approach to the mainland of the mountainous shores of 
Victoria Island. The beach was strewn with pieces of drift-wood, 
and on one of them we found the marks of recent choppings with a 
dull adze. A search of the beach for half a mile each way revealed 
numerous similar choppings. Evidently the men who had made 
them had been testing the pieces of wood to see if they were sound 
enough to become the materials for sleds or other things they had 
wished to make. Those pieces which had but one or two adze 
marks had been found unsound; in a few places piles of chips 
showed that a sound piece had been found there and had been 
roughed down for transportation purposes on the spot. Prepos- 
sessed by the idea that Victoria Island was probably inhabited 
because Rae had seen people on its southwest coast in 1851, and the 
mainland probably uninhabited because Richardson had failed to 
find any people on it in 1826 and again in 1848, I decided that the 
men whose traces we saw were probably Victoria Islanders who had 
with sleds crossed the frozen straits from the land whose mountains 



168 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

we could faintly see to the north, and had returned to its woodless 
shores with the drift-wood they had picked up here. We learned later 
that this supposition was wrong ; the people whose traces we found 
were mainland dwellers whose ancestors must have been hunting 
inland to the south when Richardson twice passed without seeing 
them. 

The night after this discovery we did not sleep much. The 
Eskimo were more excited than I was, apparently, and far into the 
morning they talked and speculated on the meaning of the signs. 
Had we come upon traces of the Nagyuktogmiut " who kill all stran- 
gers " ? Fortunately enough, my long-entertained fear that traces 
of people would cause a panic in my party was not realized. In 
spite of all their talk, and in spite of the fact that they were seriously 
afraid, the curiosity as to what these strange people would prove to 
be like — in fine, the spirit of adventure, which seldom crops out in 
an Eskimo — was far stronger than their fears. We were therefore 
up early the next morning, and soon out on the road. 

All that day we found along the beach comparatively fresh traces 
of people, chiefly shavings and chips where the hewing and shaping 
of wood had taken place. None seen that day were of the present 
winter, though some seemed to be of the previous summer; but 
the next morning, just east of Point Young, we found at last 
human footprints in the crusted snow and sled tracks that were not 
over three months old. That day at Cape Bexley we came upon a 
deserted village of over fifty snow houses ; their inhabitants had 
apparently left them about midwinter, and it was now the 12th of 
May. 

The size of the deserted village took our breath away. Tannau- 
mirk, the young man from the Mackenzie River, had never seen an 
inhabited village among his people of more than twelve or fifteen 
houses. All his old fears of the Nagyuktogmiut "who kill all stran- 
gers" now came to the surface afresh; all the stories that he knew 
of their peculiar ways and atrocious deeds were retold by him that 
evening for our common benefit. 

A broad but three months' untraveled trail led north from this 
village site across the ice toward Victoria Island. My intentions 
were to continue east along the mainland into Coronation Gulf, 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 169 

but I decided nevertheless to stop here long enough to make an 
attempt to find the people at whose village we had camped. We 
would leave most of our gear on shore, with Pannigabluk to take care 
of it, while the two men and myself took the trail across the ice. 
This was according to Eskimo etiquette — on approach to the coun- 
try of strange or distrusted people non-combatants are left behind, 
and only the able men of the party advance to a cautious parley. 
In this case the Mackenzie River man, Tannaumirk, was frightened 
enough to let his pride go by the board and to ask that he, too, might 
stay on shore at the camp. I told him he might, and Natkusiak and 
I prepared to start alone with a light sled, but at the last moment 
Tannaumirk decided he preferred to go with us, as the Nagyuk- 
togmiut were likely in our absence to discover our camp, to surprise 
it by night, and to kill him while he slept. It^would be safer, he 
thought, to go with us. Pannigabluk was much the coolest of the 
three Eskimo ; if she was afraid to be left alone on shore she did not 
show it; she merely said that she might get lonesome if we were 
gone more than three or four days. We left her cheerfully engaged 
in the mending of our worn footgear, and at 2.30 p.m.. May 13th, 
1910, we took the old but nevertheless plain trail northward into the 
rough sea ice. 

It was only near shore that the ice was rough, and with our light 
sled we made good progress ; it was the first time on the trip that we 
did not have to pull in harness ourselves ; instead we took turns in 
riding, two sitting on the sled at the same time and one running 
ahead to cheer the dogs on. We made about six miles per hour, and 
inside of two hours we arrived at another deserted village, about a 
month more recent than the one found at Cape Bexley. We were, 
therefore, on the trail not of a traveling party but of a migratory 
community. 

As we understood dimly then and know definitely now, each 
village on such a trail should be about ten miles from the next 
preceding, and should be about a month more recent. The ex- 
planation of this is simple. The village of a people who hunt 
seal on level "bay" ice must not be on shore, for it is not con- 
venient for a hunter to go more than five miles at the most from 
camp to look for the seal-holes, and naturally there are no seal-holes 



170 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

on land ; the inhabitants of a sea village can hunt through an entire 
circle whose radius is about five miles ; the inhabitants of a shore 
village can hunt through only half a circle of the same radius, for the 
other half of it will be on land. When the frost overtakes the seals 
in the fall, each of them, wherever he happens to be, gnaws several 
holes in the thin ice and rises to these whenever he needs to breathe. 
As the ice thickens he keeps them open by continuous gnawing, 
and for the whole of the winter that follows he is kept a prisoner 
in their neighborhood because of the fact that if he ever went to 
a considerable distance he would be unable to find a place to 
reach the air, and would therefore die of suffocation. By the aid 
of their dogs the Eskimo find these breathing-holes of the seals 
underneath the snow that hides them in winter, and spear the ani- 
mals as they rise for air. In a month or so the hunters of a single 
village will have killed all the seals within a radius of about five 
miles ; they must then move camp about ten miles, so that a five-mile 
circle around their next camp shall be tangent to the five-mile circle 
about their last one; for if the circles overlapped there would 
be that much waste territory within the new circle of activities. If, 
then, you are following such a trail and come to a village about 
four months old, you will expect to find the people who made it not 
more than forty miles off. 

In the present case our task was simplified by the fact that 
the group we were following had not moved straight ahead north, 
but had made their fourth camp west of the second. Standing on 
the roofs of the houses of the second camp, we could see three 
seal-hunters a few miles to the west, each sitting on his block of snow 
by a seal-hole waiting for the animal to rise. 

The seal-hunters and their camp were up the wind, and our dogs 
scented them. As we bore swiftly down upon the nearest of the 
sealers the dogs showed enthusiasm and anticipation as keen as mine, 
keener by a great deal than did my Eskimo. As the hunter was sep- 
arated from each of his fellow-huntsmen by a full half-mile, I thought 
he would probably be frightened if all of us were to rush up to him 
at the top speed of our dogs. We therefore stopped our sled several 
hundred yards away. Tannaumirk had become braver now, for 
the lone stranger did not look formidable, sitting stooped for- 




Our Sled at a Permanently Deserted Snow Village. 

The dark openings are not windows, but are made for passing household goods out 
when house is abandoned. 




Temporarily Deserted Village. 
The people will return for their belongings left behind. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 171 

ward as he was on his block of snow beside the seal-hole ; he accord- 
ingly volunteered to act as our ambassador, saying that the Macken- 
zie dialect (his own) was probably nearer the stranger's tongue than 
Natkusiak's. This seemed likely, so I told him to go ahead. The 
sealer sat motionless as Tannaumirk approached him ; I watched him 
through my glasses and saw that he held his face steadily as if watch- 
ing the seal-hole, but that he raised his eyes every second or two to 
the (to him) strange figure of the man approaching. He was evi- 
dently tensely ready for action. Tannaumirk by now was thoroughly 
over his fears, and would have walked right up to the sealer, 
but when no more than five paces or so intervened between them 
the sealer suddenly jumped up, grasping a long knife that had lain 
on the snow beside him, and poising himself as if to receive an attack 
or to be ready to leap forward suddenly. This scared our man, who 
stopped abruptly and began excitedly and volubly to assure the 
sealer that he and all of us were friendly and harmless, men of excel- 
lent character and intentions. 

I was, of course, too far away to hear, but Tannaumirk told me 
afterward that on the instant of jumping up the sealer began a mo- 
notonous noise which is not a chant nor is it words — it is merely an 
effort to ward off dumbness, for if a man who is in the presence of 
a spirit does not make at least one sound each time he draws his 
breath, he will be stricken permanently dumb. This is a belief com- 
mon to the Alaska and Coronation Gulf Eskimo. For several 
minutes Tannaumirk talked excitedly, and the sealer kept up the 
moaning noise, quite unable to realize, apparently, that he was being 
spoken to in human speech. It did not occur to him for a long time, 
he told us afterward, that we might be something other than spirits, 
for our dogs and dog harness, our sleds and clothes, were such as he 
had never seen in all his wanderings; besides, we had not, on 
approaching, used the peace sign of his people, which is holding the 
hands out to show that one does not carry a knife. 

After what may have been anything from five to fifteen minutes 
of talking and expostulation by Tannaumirk, the man finally began 
to listen and then to answer. The dialects proved to differ about as 
much as Norwegian does from Swedish, or Spanish from Portuguese. 
After Tannaumirk had made him understand the assurance that we 



172 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

were of good intent and character, and had showed by Hfting his own 
coat that he had no knife, the sealer approached him cautiously and 
felt of him, partly (as he told us later) to assure himself that he was 
not a spirit, and partly to see if there were not a knife. hidden some- 
where under his clothes. After a careful examination and some 
further parley, he told Tannaumirk to tell us that thef two would 
proceed home to the village, and Natkusiak and I might follow as far 
behind as we were now; when they got to the village we were to 
remain outside it till the people could be informed that we were 
visitors with friendly intentions. 

As we proceeded toward the village other seal-hunters gradually 
converged toward us from all over the neighboring four or five square 
miles of ice and joined Tannaumirk and his companion, who walked 
about two hundred yards ahead. As each of these was armed with 
a long knife and a seal-spear, it may be imagined that the never very 
brave Tannaumirk was pretty thoroughly frightened — to which 
he owned up freely that night and the few days next following, 
though he had forgotten the circumstance completely by next year, 
when we returned to his own people in the Mackenzie district, where 
he is now a drawing-room lion on the strength of his adventures in 
the far east. When we approached the village every man, woman, 
and child was outdoors, waiting for us excitedly, for they could tell 
from afar that we were no ordinary visitors. The man whom we 
had first approached — who that day acquired a local prominence 
which still distinguishes him above his fellows — ^ explained to an 
eagerly silent crowd that we were friends from a distance who had 
come without evil intent, and immediately the whole crowd (about 
forty) came running toward us. ' As each came up he would say : 
"I am So-and-so. I am well disposed. I have no knife. Who 
are you ? " After being told our names in return, and being 
assured that we were friendly, and that our knives were packed 
away in the sled and not hidden under our clothing, each would 
express his satisfaction and stand aside for the next to present him- 
self. Sometimes a man would present his wife, or a woman her 
husband, according to which came up first. The women were in 
more hurry to be presented than were the men, for they must, they 
said, go right back to their houses to cook us something to eat. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 173 

After the women were gone the men asked us whether we preferred 
to have our camp right in the village or a little outside it. On talking 
it over we agreed it would be better to camp about two hundred 
yards from the other houses, so as to keep our dogs from fight- 
ing with theirs. When this was decided, half a dozen small boys 
were sent home to as many houses to get their fathers' snow-knives 
and house-building mittens. We were not allowed to touch a hand 
to anything in camp-making, but stood idly by, surrounded con- 
tinually by a crowd who used every means to show how friendly 
they felt and how welcome we were, while a few of the best house- 
builders set about erecting for us the house in which we were to live 
as long as we cared to stay with them. When it had been finished 
and furnished with the skins, lamp, and the other things that go to 
make a snow house the coziest and most comfortable of camps, they 
told us they hoped we would occupy it at least till the last piece of 
meat in their storehouses had been eaten, and that so long as we stayed 
in the village no man would hunt seals or do any work until his chil- 
dren began to complain of hunger. It was to be a holiday, they said, 
for this was the first time their people had been visited by strangers 
from so great a distance that they knew nothing of the land from 
which they came. 

These simple, well-bred, and hospitable people were the savages 
whom we had come so far to see. That evening they saw for the 
first time the lighting of a sulphur match ; the next day I showed 
them the greater marvels of my rifle; it was a day later still that 
they first understood that I was one of the white men of whom they 
had heard from other tribes, under the name kablunat. 

I asked them : " Couldn't you tell by my blue eyes and the color 
of my beard ?" 

"But we didn't know," they answered, "what sort of complexions 
the kablunat have. Besides, our next neighbors north have eyes 
and beards like yours." That was how they first told us of the people 
whose discovery has brought up such important biological and his- 
torical problems, the people who have since become known to news- 
paper readers as the " Blond Eskimo." 




CHAPTER XI 

UR first day among the Dolphin and Union Straits Eskimo 
was the day of all my life to which I had looked forward 
with the most vivid anticipations, and to which I now look 
back with equally vivid memories, for it introduced me, a student 
of mankind and of primitive men especially, to a people of a bygone 
age. Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee went to sleep in the nine- 
teenth century and woke up in King Arthur's time among knights 
who rode in clinking mail to the rescue of fair ladies ; we, without 
going to sleep at all, had walked out of the twentieth century into 
the country of the intellectual and cultural contemporaries of a far 
earlier age than King Arthur's. These were not such men as Csesar 
found in Gaul or in Britain; they were more nearly like the still 
earlier hunting tribes of Britain and of Gaul living contemporaneous 
to but oblivious of the building of the first pyramid in Egypt. Their 
existence on the same continent with our populous cities was an an- 
achronism of ten thousand years in intelligence and material develop- 
ment. They gathered their food with the weapons of the men of the 
Stone Age, they thought their simple, primitive thoughts and lived 
their insecure and tense lives — lives that were to me the mirrors of 
the lives of our far ancestors whose bones and crude handiwork we 
now and then discover in river gravels or in prehistoric caves. Such 
archaeological remains found in various parts of the world of the 
men who antedated the knowledge of the smelting of metals, tell a 
fascinating story to him whose scientific imagination can piece it 
together and fill in the wide gaps ; but far better than such dreaming 
was my present opportunity. I had nothing to imagine; I had 
merely to look and listen ; for here were not remains of the Stone 
Age, but the Stone Age itself, men and women, very human, entirely 
friendly, who welcomed us to their homes and bade us stay. 

The dialect they spoke difi^ered so little from the Mackenzie River 
speech which I had acquired in three years of living in the houses 

174 




Village, Dolphin and Union Straits, Early May. 
Walls of snow, roofs of skins. 




A Stone House of Unknown Origin. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 175 

and traveling camps of the western Eskimo that we could make 
ourselves understood from the first. It cannot have happened 
often in the history of the world that the first white man to visit a 
primitive people was one who spoke their language. My oppor- 
tunities were therefore unusual. Long before the year was over I 
was destined to become as one of them, and even from the first 
hour we were able to converse sympathetically on subjects of com- 
mon concern. Nothing that I have to tell from the Arctic is of greater 
intrinsic interest or more likely to be considered a contribution to 
knowledge than the story of our first day with these people who had 
not, either they or their ancestors, seen a white man until they saw 
me. I shall therefore tell that story. 

Like our distant ancestors, no doubt, these people fear most of all 
things the evil spirits that are likely to appear to them at any time 
in any guise, and next to that they fear strangers. Our first meeting 
had been a bit doubtful and dramatic through our being mistaken 
for spirits, but now they had felt of us and talked with us, and knew 
we were but common men. Strangers we were, it is true, but we 
were only three among forty of them, and were therefore not to be 
feared. Besides, they told us, they knew we could harbor no guile 
from the freedom and frankness with which we came among them ; 
for, they said, a man who plots treachery never turns his back to 
those whom he intends to stab from behind. 

Before the house which they immediately built for us was quite 
ready for our occupancy children came running from the village to 
announce that their mothers had dinner ready. The houses were 
so small that it was not convenient to invite all three of us into the 
same one to eat ; besides, it was not etiquette to do so, as we now 
know. Each of us was, therefore, taken to a different place. My 
host was the seal-hunter whom we had first approached on the ice. 
His house would, he said, be a fitting one in which to offer me my 
first meal among them, for his wife had been born farther west 
on the mainland coast than any one else in their village, and it was 
even said that her ancestors had not belonged originally to their 
people, but were immigrants from the westward. She would, there- 
fore, like to ask me questions. 

It turned out, however, that his wife was not a talkative person, 



176 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

but motherly, kindly, and hospitable, like all her countrywomen. 
Her first questions were not of the land from which I came, but of 
my footgear. Weren't my feet just a little damp, and might she 
not pull my boots off for me and dry them over the lamp ? Would 
I not put on a pair of her husband's dry socks, and was there no little 
hole in my mittens or coat that she could mend for me ? She had 
boiled some seal-meat for me, but she had not boiled any fat, for she 
did not know whether I preferred the blubber boiled or raw. They 
always cut it in small pieces and ate it raw themselves ; but the pot 
still hung over the lamp, and anything she put into it would be cooked 
in a moment. 

When I told her that my tastes quite coincided with theirs — as, 
in fact, they did — she was delighted. People were much alike, 
then, after all, though they came from a great distance. She would, 
accordingly, treat me exactly as if I were one of their own people 
come to visit them from afar — and, in fact, I was one of their own 
people, for she had heard that the wicked Indians to the south spoke 
a language no man could understand, and I spoke with but a slight 
flavor of strangeness. 

When we had entered the house the boiled pieces of seal-meat 
had already been taken out of the pot and lay steaming on a side- 
board. On being assured that my tastes in food were not likely to 
differ from theirs, my hostess picked out for me the lower joint of a 
seal's fore leg, squeezed it firmly between her hands to make sure 
nothing should later drip from it, and handed it to me, along with 
her own copper-bladed knife ; the next most desirable piece was 
similarly squeezed and handed to her husband, and others in turn to 
the rest of the family. When this had been done, one extra piece 
was set aside in case I should want a second helping, and the rest of 
the boiled meat was divided into four portions, with the explanation 
to me that there were four families in the village who had no fresh 
seal-meat. The little adopted daughter of the house, a girl of seven 
or eight, had not begun to eat with the rest of us, for it was her task 
to take a small wooden platter and carry the four pieces of boiled 
meat to the four families who had none of their own to cook, I 
thought to myself that the pieces sent out were a good deal smaller 
than the individual portions we were eating, and that the recipients 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 177 

would not get quite a square meal; but I learned later that night 
from my two companions that four similar presents had been sent 
out from each of the houses where they were eating, and I know now 
that every house in the village in which any cooking was done had 
likewise sent four portions, so that the aggregate must have been 
a good deal more than the recipients could eat at one time. During 
our meal presents of food were also brought us from other houses; 
each housewife apparently knew exactly what the others had put in 
their pots, and whoever had anything to offer that was a little bit 
different would send some of that to the others, so that every minute 
or two a small girl messenger appeared in our door with a platter of 
something to contribute to our meal. Some of the gifts were es- 
pecially designated as for me — mother had said that however 
they divided the rest of what she was sending, the boiled kidney 
was for me; or mother had sent this small piece of boiled seal- 
flipper to me, with the message that if I would take breakfast at 
their house to-morrow I should have a whole flipper, for one of my 
companions was over at their house now, and had told them that I 
considered the flipper the best part of a seal. 

As we ate we sat on the front edge of the bed-platform, holding 
each his piece of meat in the left hand and the knife in the right. 
This was my first experience with a knife of native copper ; I found 
it more than sharp enough and very serviceable. The piece of cop- 
per (float) from which the blade had been hammered out had been 
found, they told me, on Victoria Island to the north in the territory 
of another tribe, from whom they had bought it for some good drift- 
wood from the mainland coast. My hostess sat on my right in front 
of the cooking-lamp, her husband on my left. As the house was only 
the ordinary oval snow dome, about seven by nine feet in inside di- 
mensions, there was only free room for the three of us on the front 
edge of the two-foot-high snow platform, over which reindeer, bear, 
and musk-ox skins had been spread to make the bed. The children, 
therefore, ate standing up on the small, open floor space to the right 
of the door as one enters ; the lamp and cooking-gear and frames for 
drying clothing over the lamp took up all the space to the left of the 
door. In the horseshoe-shaped, three-foot-high doorway stood the 
three dogs of my host, side by side, waiting for some one to finish 

N 



178 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the picking of a bone. As each of us in turn finished a bone we 
would toss it to one of the dogs, who retired with it to the alleyway, 
and returned to his position in line again as soon as he had finished 
it. When the meal was over they all went away unbidden, to curl 
up and sleep in the alleyway or out-of-doors. 

^^"" Our meal was of two courses : the first, meat; the second, soup. 
The soup is made by pouring cold seal blood into the boiling broth 
immediately after the cooked meat has been taken out of the pot, and 
stirring briskly until the whole comes nearly (but never quite) to a 
boil. This makes a soup of a thickness comparable to our English 
pea-soups, but if the pot be allowed to come to a boil, the blood will 
coagulate and settle to the bottom. When the pot lacks a few degrees 
of boiling, the lamp above which it is swung is extinguished and a 
few handfuls of snow are stirred into the soup to bring it to a tem- 
perature at which it can be freely drunk. By means of a small 
dipper the housewife then fills the large musk-ox-horn drinking-cups 
and assigns one to each person ; if the number of cups is short, two 
or more persons may share the contents of one cup, or a cup may be 
refilled when one is through with it and passed to another. 

After I had eaten my fill of fresh seal-meat and drunk two pint 
cupfuls of blood soup, my host and I moved farther back on the bed- 
platform, where we could sit comfortably, propped up against bun- 
dles of soft caribou-skins, while we talked of various things. He 
and his wife asked but few questions, and only such as could not be 
considered intrusive, either according to their standards as I learned 
them later or according to ours. They understood perfectly, they 
said, why we had left behind the woman of our party when we came 
upon their trail, for it is always safest to assume that strangers are 
going to prove hostile ; but now that we knew them to be harmless 
and friendly, would we not allow them to send a sled in the morning 
to bring her to the village ? They had often heard that their ances- 
tors used to come in contact with people to the west, and now it 
was their good fortune to have with them some men from the west, 
and they would like to see a western woman, too. It must be a 
very long way to the land from which we came ; were we not satiated 
with traveling, and did we not think of spending the summer with 
them? Of course, the tribes who lived farther east would also be 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 179 

glad to see us, and would treat us well, unless we went too far to the 
east and fell in with the Netsilik Eskimo (King William Island), 
who are wicked, treacherous people who — strange to say — have 
no chins. Beyond them, they had heard, lived the white men 
(Kablunat), of whom, no doubt, we had never heard, seeing we came 
from the west, and the white men are farthest of all people to the 
east. They are said to have various physical deformities ; they had 
heard that some of them had one eye in the middle of the forehead, 
but of this they were not sure, because stories that come from afar 
are always doubtful. The white men were said to be of a strangely 
eccentric disposition ; when they gave anything to an Eskimo they 
would take no pay for it, and they would not eat good, ordinary 
food, but subsisted on various things which a normal person could 
not think of forcing himself to swallow except in case of starvation. 
And this in spite of the fact that the white men could have better 
things to eat if they wanted to, for seals, whales, fish, and even cari- 
bou abound in their country. 

These and a great many other things I was told with friendly 
readiness ; I had only to give them a hint as to what interested me, 
and they put all their information on that subject at my disposal; 
but on their own part they showed the greatest delicacy in asking 
questions. Were they not interested, I asked them, to know why 
I had come and where I was going ? Yes, they were interested, but 
they knew that if I wanted them to know I would tell them. Asking 
many questions of strangers was not their custom, but they consid- 
ered that I asked many because that was no doubt the manner of 
my people ; it was to be expected that men coming from so great a 
distance would have customs different from theirs ; and as for them, 
they were glad to answer my questions, and I would have to stay 
many days before they got tired of doing whatever they could to 
show they were glad I had come. 

After the meal was finished we sat and talked perhaps an hour, 
until a messenger came (it was always the children who carried mes- 
sages) to say that my companions had gone to the house that had 
been built for us, and that the people hoped I would come there, 
too, for it was a big house, and many could sit in there at once and 
talk with us. On arriving home I found that, although over half 



180 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the village were already there, still we had plenty of room within 
doors for the four or five who had come along with me to see me home. 
The floor of the inner half of the house had been raised into the usual 
two-foot-high snow sleeping-platform, covered with skins, partly 
ours and partly contributed by various households for our com- 
fort; a seal-oil lamp for heating and lighting ^purposes had been 
installed. It was a cozy place, heated by the lamp to a temperature 
of 60° Fahr. in spite of the fact that it was well ventilated by a door 
that was never closed day or night, and a hole in the roof that was 
also always open. On the bed-platform there was room for twelve 
or fifteen persons to sit Turkish fashion, and on the floor in front 
another fifteen could easily stand.) 

Although the house was full of guests at my home-coming, they 
merely stayed a few minutes, for some one suggested that we were 
no doubt tired and sleepy and would like to be left alone. In the 
morning, they said, we should have plenty of time for talking. When 
they were all gone, however, we did not go to sleep, but sat up fully 
half the night discussing the strange things we had seen. My 
Eskimo were considerably more excited over it all than I. It was, 
they said, as if we were living through a story such as the old men 
tell in the assembly-house when the sun is away in winter. What 
kindly, inoffensive-looking people these were, but no doubt they were 
powerful and dangerous magicians such as the stories tell about and 
such as my companions' fathers had known in their youth. My 
Mackenzie man, Tannaumirk, had, in fact, heard something to make 
this clear, for he had eaten supper in the house of a man who last 
winter had dropped his knife into a seal-hole through the ice where 
the sea was very deep, but so powerful was the spell he pronounced 
that when he reached into the water afterward the water came 
only to his elbow and he picked the knife off the ocean bottom. 
And this, Tannaumirk commented, in spite of the fact that the ice 
alone was at least a fathom thick and the water so deep that a stone 
dropped into it would no doubt take a long time to sink to the bottom. 

Did they believe all this, I asked my men, though I knew what 
answer I would get. Of course they did. Why should I ask ? Had 
they not often told me that their own people were able to do such 
things until a few years ago, when they abjured their familiar spirits 




Watching the Arrival of Visitors. 




Bowmen hunting Ptarmigan. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 181 

on learning from the missionary of the existence of heaven and hell, 
and of the fact that no one can attain salvation who employs spirits 
to do his bidding ? It was too bad that salvation and the practice 
of magic were incompatible ; not that such trivial things as the re- 
covery of lost articles were of moment, but in the cure of sickness 
and the control of weather and ice conditions, prayers seemed so 
much less efficient than the old charms. Still, of course, they did 
not really regret the loss of the old knowledge and power, for did 
they not have the inestimable prospect of salvation which had been 
denied their forefathers through the unfortunate lateness of the com- 
ing of the missionaries ? It was mere shortsightedness to regret hav- 
ing renounced the miraculous ability to cure disease, for God knows 
best when one should die, and to him who prays faithfully and never 
works on Sunday, death is but the entrance to a happier life. 

We did not know, the next morning when we woke up and began 
to stir about within doors, that some one had been for a long time 
listening outside our snow house, waiting for signs of our being awake. 
From familiarity with their customs I now know that it was a signal 
from him that brought us our earliest visitors of the morning, the 
hunter whom we had first encountered the previous evening. He 
came from the village, walking slowly and singing at the top of his 
voice so that we might have ample warning of his approach. ■ When 
he came to the outer door of our twenty-foot alleyway he stopped 
and announced himself : " I am So-and-so ; my intentions are 
friendly ; I have no knife. May I come in ?" This was the invari- 
able formula in our case; among themselves they would merely 
announce as they were about to enter a house : " I am So-and-so ; 
I am coming in." 

The talk that morning turned on various things. Who were their 
neighbors to the east and to the north ? Had they ever come in 
contact with the Indians to the south ? Had they any knowledge 
of white men visiting their country (for I considered it possible, 
though not likely, that some survivors of Franklin's luckless ships, 
wrecked more than half a century ago near the east coast of Victoria 
Island, might have lived for a time among these people). Although 
they were doubtless as curious concerning us as I was about them, 
still they asked few questions, even after I had given them an open- 



182 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

ing by asking many questions of them. Their admirable reticence 
and good breeding made me feel more nearly ashamed of my calling 
than I had ever been before, for an ethnologist must make inquiries, 
and impertinent ones at times; but they answered with greatest 
good humor. They had never seen white men, although they had 
heard about them the things they had told me last night ; the Indians 
they had never seen, but they had seen traces of them on the main- 
land to the south where the musk-oxen are, and they knew by hear- 
say from the Coppermine River Eskimo that the Indians are treach- 
erous, bloodthirsty people, wicked and great magicians — no greater 
magicians, it was said, than the white men, but more prone to use 
their power for evil purposes. To the east lived various Eskimo 
tribes (of whom they named over a dozen), all of whom were friendly. 
To the north, on Victoria Island, lived two tribes, their nearest 
neighbors and best friends. 

And what did they think of me — to what people did they suppose 
I belonged ? Oh, but they did not have to guess ; they knew ; 
for Tannaumirk had told them he belonged to the Kupagmiut, of 
whom they had heard many stories from their fathers, and my accent 
made it plain I belonged to the Kupagmiut also, and not to that 
more distant people to whom my other companion, Natkusiak, be- 
longed, whose language was more strange than ours, and of whom 
they had never heard the name till told of them last night. But 
didn't they consider strange my eyes (which are blue), and my beard 
(which was light brown), and suppose that for that reason I belonged 
to a different people ? Their answer was decisive : " We have no 
reason to think you belong to a different people. Your speech dif- 
fers only a little more from ours than does that of some tribes with 
whom we trade every year; and as for your eyes and beard, they 
are much like those of some of our neighbors to the north, whom you 
must visit. They are our best friends, and they will never cease 
being sorry if you pass on to the east without seeing them." So 
it was arranged that on the morrow we should pay a visit to the people 
of Victoria Island, who were described to me in a way to make me 
think that likely I had found the descendants of some of the lost 
men of the Franklin expedition. We know now that the facts call 
for another interpretation. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 183 

One of the things that interested me was to see some shooting 
with the strong-looking bows and long copper-tipped arrows that 
we found in the possession of every man of the tribe. I therefore 
said that I would like to have them illustrate to me the manner in 
which they killed caribou, and I would in turn show them the weapons 
and method used by us. Half a dozen of the men at once sent home 
for their bows, and a block of snow to serve as a target was set up in 
front of our house. The range at which a target a foot square could 
be hit with fair regularity turned out to be about thirty or thirty-five 
yards, and the extreme range of the bow was a bit over one hundred 
yards, while the range at which caribou are ordinarily shot was shown 
to be about seventy-five yards. When the exhibition was over, I 
set up a stick at about two hundred yards and fired at it. The people 
— men, women, and children — who stood around had no idea as 
to the character of the thing I was about to do, and when they heard 
the loud report of my gun all the women and children made a scram- 
ble for the houses, while the men ran back about fifteen or twenty 
yards and stood talking together excitedly behind a snow wall. 
I at once went to them and asked them to come with me to the stick 
and see what had happened to it. After some persuasion three of 
them complied, but unfortunately for me it turned out that I had 
failed to score. At this they seemed much relieved, but when I 
told them I would try again they protested earnestly, saying that so 
loud a noise would scare all the seals away from their hunting 
grounds, and the people would therefore starve. 

It seemed to me imperative, however, to show them I could keep 
my word and perforate the stick at two hundred yards, and in spite 
of their protests I got ready to shoot again, telling them that we used 
these weapons in the west for seal-hunting, and that the noise was 
found not to scare seals away. The second shot happened to hit, 
but on the whole the mark of the bullet on the stick impressed them 
far less than the noise. In fact, they did not seem to marvel at it 
at all. When I explained to them that I could kill a polar bear or a 
caribou at even twice the distance the stick had been from me they 
exhibited no surprise, but asked me if I could with my rifle kill a 
caribou on the other side of a mountain. When I said that I could 
not, they told me a great shaman in a neighboring tribe had a magic 



184 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

arrow by which he could kill caribou on the other side of no matter 
how big a mountain. In other words, much to my surprise, they 
considered the performance of my rifle nothing wonderful. 

I understand the point of view better now than I did then. It is 
simply this : if you were to show an Eskimo a bow that would in 
the ordinary way shoot fifty yards farther than any bow he ever saw, 
the man would never cease marveling, and he would tell of that bow 
as long as he lived; he would understand exactly the principle on 
which it works, would judge it by the standards of the natural, and 
would find it to excel marvelously. But show him the work of the 
rifle, which he does not in the least understand, and he is face to 
face with a miracle ; he judges it by the standards of the supernatural 
instead of by the standards of the natural ; he compares it with other 
miraculous things of which he has heard and which he may even 
think he has himself seen, and he finds it not at all beyond the average 
of miracles; for the wonders of our science and the wildest tales of 
our own mythologies pale beside the marvels which the Eskimo 
suppose to be happening all around them every day at the behest 
of their magicians. 

Perhaps I might here digress from the chronological order of my 
story to point out that the Eskimo's refusal to be astonished by the 
killing at a great distance of caribou or a bear by a rifle bullet whose 
flight was unerring and invisible, was not an isolated case. When 
I showed them later my binoculars that made far-away things seem 
near and clear, they were of course interested ; when I looked to the 
south or east and saw bands of caribou that were to them invisible, 
they applauded, and then followed the suggestion : " Now that you 
have looked for the caribou that are here to-day and found them, will 
you not also look for the caribou that are coming to-morrow, so that 
we can tell where to lie in ambush for them?" When they heard 
that my glasses could not see into the future, they were disappointed 
and naturally the reverse of well impressed with our powers, for 
they knew that their own medicine-men had charms and magic 
paraphernalia that enabled them to see things the morrow was to 
bring forth. 

At another time, in describing to them the skill of our surgeons, 
I told that they could put a man to sleep and while he slept take out 




Mamayauk. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 185 

a section of his intestines or one of his kidneys, and the man when 
he woke up would not even know what had been done to him, except 
as he was told and as he could see the sewed-up opening through which 
the part had been removed. Our doctors could even transplant 
the organs of one man into the body of another. These things I 
had actually never seen done, but that they were done was a matter 
of common knowledge in my country. It was similar in their 
country, one of my listeners told me. He himself had a friend 
who suffered continually from backache until a great medicine-man 
undertook to treat him. The next night, while the patient slept, the 
medicine-man removed the entire spinal column, which had become 
diseased, and replaced it with a complete new set of vertebrae, and — 
what was most wonderful — there was not a scratch on the patient's 
skin or anything to show that the exchange had been made. This 
thing the narrator had not seen done, but the truth of it was a matter 
of common knowledge among his people. Another man had had his 
diseased heart replaced with a new and sound one. In other words, 
the Eskimo believed as thoroughly as I in the truth of what he told ; 
neither of us had seen the things actually done, but that they were 
done was a matter of common belief among our respective country- 
men; and the things he told of his medicine-men were more mar- 
velous than the things I could tell of mine. In fact, I had to admit 
that the transplanting of spinal columns and hearts was beyond the 
skill of my countrymen ; and as they had the good breeding not to 
openly doubt any of my stories, it would have been ill-mannered of 
me to question theirs. Besides, questioning them would have done 
no good; I could not have changed by an iota their rock-founded 
faith in their medicine-men and spiritrcompelling charms. In spite 
of any arguments I could have put forth, the net result of our ex- 
change of stories would have been just what it was, anyway — that 
they considered they had learned from my own lips that in point of 
skill our doctors are not the equals of theirs. , — j 

It was near noon of our first day when some one asked me if / 
there were not some way in which the western people celebrated the 
coming of visitors. I replied that usually all the village gathered in 
a great dance. That was just their way, my hosts told me, and, see- 
ing that our customs coincided, they would make to-day a dance- 



186 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

house, as large as if two large tribes had met to trade ; we should 
see how they danced, and possibly we might dance for them, too. 
The idea was no sooner broached than a dozen young men ran off to 
their various houses to don their house-building coats and mittens 
and get their snow-knives. By mid-afternoon the dance-house was 
up, a snow dome nine feet high, and large enough to accommodate 
forty people standing in a circle around a five-foot open space in the 
center reserved for the dancers. 

The conditions of life had for many years been hard in the tribe, 
I was told, and while their ancestors had danced often and had had 
many drums (the only musical instrument of the Eskimo), they 
themselves had of late years danced but seldom, and there was only 
one drum left among them. It was a sunshiny, warm day, and while 
the men were building the dance-house some one fetched the drum, 
and a yoimg woman sang for us to its accompaniment. She handled 
it like a tambourine, and played it in a manner entirely different from 
that of the western Eskimo. The songs were different, too, and they 
sang them charmingly. One song had a rhythm resembling that of 
the ancient Norse scaldic poems. The girl who sang it was herself 
very fair for an Eskimo, and had the long, slim fingers I have seen 
only among half-bloods in Alaska. It was here I got the first definite 
suggestion that the blond traits which were observable in this tribe 
(though not to such a degree as among other tribes later visited) 
might have some direct connection with the lost Scandinavian colo- 
nists of Greenland. 

The dance, which began as soon as the dance-house was built, 
continued the rest of the afternoon. None of the dances were iden- 
tical with any known to my companions from Alaska or the Macken- 
zie, but there was a general similarity. The performers differed in 
some cases markedly among themselves ; those especially whose 
ancestors were said to have come from the mainland coast to the 
west differed strongly from the rest. Many of the dances were 
performed without moving the feet at all, but by swaying the body 
and gesticulating with the arms. In some cases the performer sang, 
recited, or uttered a series of exclamations, in others he was silent; 
but all the dances were done to the accompaniment of the singing of 
all those present, who knew the song appropriate to each dance. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO ' 187 

Some dapces known to individuals could not be shown because no 
one was found who could sing the accompaniment. 

At this time of year (the middle of May) there was no darkness 
at midnight, for summer was approaching. Nevertheless the people 
took three meals a day with fair regularity, and our dance ended 
about eight o'clock in the evening, when the women announced sup- 
per. After supper I sat awhile and talked with my host and hostess 
and one or two visitors, and then all of them walked home with me 
to our house, where about half the village was gathered as on the 
evening before. They stayed only a short while, and by eleven 
o'clock the last visitor had wished us a friendly good night and our 
first day among the Victoria Island Eskimo had come to an end. , 



CHAPTER XII 

MAY 15, 1910, was the third day after our discovery of the 
Dolphin and Union Straits Eskimo. For two days they 
had entertained us with warm hospitahty, and had already 
grounded firmly in my mind the impression which a year of further 
association with them was destined to do nothing to weaken — that 
they are the equals of the best of our own race in good breeding, 
kindness, and the substantial virtues. They were men and women 
of the Stone Age truly, but they differed little from you or me or from 
the men and women who are our friends and families. The quali- 
ties which we call "Christian virtues" (and which the Buddhists 
no doubt call "Buddhist virtues") they had in all their essentials. 
They are not at all what a theorist might have supposed the people 
of the Stone Age to be, but the people of the Stone Age probably 
were what these their present-day representatives are : men with 
standards of honor, men with friends and families, men in love with 
their wives, gentle to their children, and considerate of the feelings 
and welfare of others. If we can reason at all from the present to 
the past, we can feel sure that the hand of evolution had written 
the Golden Rule in the hearts of the contemporaries of the mammoth 
millenniums before the Pyramids were built. At least, that is what 
I think. I have lived with these so-called primitive people until 
"savages" and all the kindred terms have lost the vivid meanings 
they had when I was younger and got all my ideas at second-hand ; 
but the turning blank of this picturesque part of my vocabulary has 
been made up to me by a new realization of the fact that human 
nature is the same not only the world over, but also the ages through. 
I am not clear whether it was at my own instance or that of my 
hosts that we set out on the evening of the third day to visit the people 
of Victoria Island. The hospitality shown us up to this time had 
resembled that which I might have expected in my own country 
in most details, and also in this, that they had taken equal care to 

188 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 189 

entertain us and not to weary us by too much entertainment; and 
now they seemed to get a great deal of satisfaction out of their oppor- 
tunity of guiding us on a visit to their neighbors. No doubt it was 
a matter of pride to them to have the opportunity of introducing 
such unusual visitors, but I think they also thought they were doing 
us a service, and felt in that the same satisfaction we feel in doing a 
service to a friend. 

At the point where we had discovered the Eskimo, Dolphin 
and Union straits are about as wide as the English Channel, and the 
village we had been visiting lay nearly in the middle of the straits, 
built on the six-foot-thick solid ice with which winter had covered 
the sea. If during one of the Ice Ages the English Channel was 
ever frozen over, the paleolithic Frenchmen of that day may have 
crossed afoot or by sleds, as we did, to visit their friends in Britain ; 
they may even have stopped on the road from Calais to Dover at 
a fishing-village built on the ice halfway between, such a village as 
that of our hosts of the two days past, and then proceeded north- 
ward to their island neighbors. Like our Eskimo friends, too, they 
may not have known that Britain was an island, although Britain 
is far smaller than Victoria Island. 

On the trip to Victoria Island I was accompanied by Natkusiak 
and one local man only, a man whose name sounds simple and natural 
to me through long familiarity, but which would look strange and 
unpronounceable if it were set down in English print. The after- 
noon before we started, there had been a dance in the snow assembly- 
house, followed first by a supper of boiled seal-meat and blood soup, 
and then by a conference on how we should go about finding the 
village we wanted to visit, for finding the nearest Eskimo village is 
not always the simple matter it is to go from the city to a suburban 
town. The villages, to begin with, are never permanent, nor are 
they built in any recognized places, and blizzards may nearly or 
quite obliterate the trails that show which way the traveling parties 
have gone. At first half the village wanted to accompany us, but 
common opinion overruled this proposal, for it was pointed out that 
if a large party went we should soon eat our hosts out of house and 
home if we happened to find them at a time when the hunt had not 
been particularly successful for the few days past, while they would 



190 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

no doubt be able to entertain a party of three as long as we cared to 
stay. Only one of them would therefore accompany us, a prominent 
man who had many relatives in Victoria Island, while the rest of my 
party remained in their village. 

We started at 9 p.m., going east about five miles till we found 
some snow-houses that had been deserted perhaps six weeks before ; 
the trail from here led north six miles to another deserted village, 
and then a trifle north of west five miles, where we found four in- 
habited houses, which was about half the number we should have 
found had the tribe of the Haneragmiut been all camped together. 
We had traveled sixteen miles to find a village seven miles distant 
from ours ; but that was necessary, for the deserted village we first 
came to was the only point our guide had known at which he could be 
sure to pick up the trail. The houses as we found them were three 
of them of snow with skin roofs, and one entirely of snow, and were 
built on the sea ice about ten yards from the shore of Victoria Island. 
Every one was asleep, even the dogs, and no one noticed us as we 
stopped half a mile away while our guide alone ran up to the village 
to prepare it for our coming. We saw him disappear for an instant 
into the first house, and similarly into the second, third, and fourth. 
A few moments later men and boys, hastily dressed, began to come 
out of the houses and to gather around our guide, evidently asking 
excited questions. These he apparently answered satisfactorily, 
for it was only two or three minutes till we saw him come running 
toward us, while the men turned to look after their dogs to see that 
they were all securely tied, so there should be no danger of their get- 
ting into fights with our dogs later on. We started at once to meet 
our ambassador, who beckoned to us as he ran. The message he 
brought was one of welcome, to which he added his own assurance 
that the Haneragmiut were a straightforward people whose actions 
never contradicted their words. 

Our reception at this village differed considerably from that at 
the one previously visited. We were told by our guide to halt about 
two hundred yards from the houses. As soon as w^e stopped, the 
nine men and boys started slowly toward us, walking abreast, with 
arms raised above their heads, saying : " We are friendly ; we are 
as we seem; your coming has made us glad." By the instructions 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 191 

of our guide we, including himself, stood still, holding our hands 
above our heads, waiting for the others to approach. When they 
got within ten yards they stopped and stood in line, while I — still 
following instructions — walked up to within three paces of the 
man on the right of the line, stopped, and waited for him to tell me 
his name, and then told him mine in turn. I then moved to my left 
down the line, stopping before each, and receiving his name before 
giving my own. When my introductions were over, Natkusiak 
similarly presented himself; in the case of our guide there were no 
formalities. These proceedings had begun with an air of military 
precision which did not last quite through the ceremony, for the three 
boys (about ten, eleven, and twelve years old perhaps) broke ranks 
before I had reached them in my progress down the line, and were 
later informally introduced by their fathers, while some of the men 
had begun to talk with me or with our guide before the presentation 
of Natkusiak was over. There is among these people no custom corre- 
sponding to our ceremony of hand-shaking, nor are there any words 
or set forms of salutation or farewell in their language. 

After the introductions were over everything went much as it 
had gone at the village previously visited, except that the women did 
not come out of the houses to be presented — they were too busy 
getting us something to eat, we were told. The men built us a snow- 
house in which to live while we stayed, and when that was done they 
asked us to come to their houses to meet their wives and to get some- 
thing to eat. As on previous occasions, each guest was taken to a 
separate house to be entertained. We found here the same unaffected 
kindliness that we were getting used to among these people, the same 
hospitality and good breeding. After we had eaten the boiled seal- 
meat and drunk the blood soup that were the best things they could 
offer us, they fed our dogs also with boiled meat, "for dogs like to 
be treated well, just as men do," they said ; and then we went back 
to our house to sleep, for we had been up for nearly twenty-four hours, 
and they had been asleep but an hour or two before we came. 

But before we went to sleep, and that in spite of being drowsy, 
as one always is in a snug and warm camp after a cold day's march, 
Natkusiak and I talked for hours about the extraordinary people 
among whom we found ourselves. We had been told by our guide 



192 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

that we should find the Victoria Islanders of a light complexion, 
with fair beards, but still we were not prepared for what we saw — ■ 
we had believed what we had been told, but we had not realized it. 
Natkusiak kept saying, " These are not Eskimo ; they merely dress 
and talk and act like Eskimo." And so it seemed to me. 

It is hard, looking back over a gap of years, to call to memory 
even the intense feelings with which we meet a crisis in life. That 
morning, when the nine men and boys of the village stood before me 
in line on the ice in front of their huts of snow and skins, I knew I 
was standing face to face with an important scientific discovery. 
From childhood I had been familiar with the literature of the North ; 
I knew that here a thousand and there a hundred men of Scandinavia 
and of England had disappeared into the Northern mists, to be hid 
by them forever from the eyes of Europe ; and when I saw before 
me these men who looked like Europeans in spite of their garb of 
furs, I knew that I had come upon either the last chapter and solu- 
tion of one of the historical tragedies of the past, or else that I had 
added a new mystery for the future to solve : the mystery of why 
these men are like Europeans if they be not of European descent. 
But although the situation appealed to whatever there was in me 
of the poet and the theorist, I had to remember that my supply of 
writing-paper was limited, and that the definite recording of my first 
impressions of facts was more important than filling the pages of my 
note-book with speculations. My diary entries are seldom verbose 
and often disjointed ; they are never written with an idea that they 
will be published unchanged ; there are cryptic abbreviations and 
missing verbs, — and yet I shall quote here a portion of my entry for 
May 16th, 1910, as being of more interest than a possibly better- 
phrased statement I might compose to-day, being written on the spot 
the day of my finding the "Blond Eskimo." The annotations that 
are absolutely needed to make the rest intelligible are supplied in 
parentheses. 

" I now understand why the Cape Bexley people (the first Eskimo 
discovered by us) take me for an Eskimo. There are three men 
here whose beards are almost the color of mine, and who look like 
typical Scandinavians. As Natkusiak says: 'Three of them look 
like white foremast hands on a whaler, and aren't they huge ! And 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 193 

one looks like a Portugee' ('Portugee' is the word used by the Ameri- 
can whalemen for natives of the Cape Verde Islands). Among the 
Cape Bexley people I had noted that a large number of men have a 
few light hairs in their mustaches and, more rarely, in their beards. 
Some of them have mustaches to be described as dark brown, a 
thing I have never seen in the west (Mackenzie River or Alaska). 
Here (in Victoria Island), however, are men with abundant three- 
inch-long beards, a light brown in their outer parts, but darker to- 
ward the middle of the chin. The faces and proportions of the body 
remind of 'stocky,' sunburned, but naturally fair Scandinavians. 
They (the three bearded men) are very much alike, though no two 
of them have the same mother, and all resemble closely an Icelander 
I know, Sigurjon Sveinsson, of Mountain, North Dakota, as he looked 
about 1895. . . . The one that 'looks like a Portugee' has hair 
that curls a trifle — about as much as mine. One woman, of about 
twenty, has the delicate features one sees in some Scandinavian girls, 
and that I have seen in only one of the half-white girls to the west- 
ward (Mackenzie River), and in her to a less degree than here. 
I know over twenty half-bloods (in the Mackenzie district and 
Alaska), and none of them resemble a white man in particular — 
most of them could pass for Eskimo among either Eskimo or 
whites if no particular attention were drawn to them, but no one 
could fail to be struck by the European appearance of these people 
(the Victoria Islanders). . . . More will be written of their eyes, 
etc., after I have had better opportunities of seeing them." 

The time-faded ink of such diary entries as this furnished me some 
comfort after my return to "civilization," when European cables 
and American telegraphs clamored "fake" so loudly that at times 
I almost doubted I had seen what I had seen. There were scientific 
weight and reverent age behind the names of many of those who 
argued conclusively on the basis of a judicious combination of what 
they knew and did not know, to the conclusion that what is could 
not be. They argued so deftly withal that I who came from the 
place they theorized about felt somewhat as I used to feel as an 
undergraduate in college when I listened to a philosophical demon- 
stration of the non-existence of the matter that I had to kick to con- 
vince myself that what must be wasn't so. Now that the din has 



194 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

quieted down, I am gradually coming to the conviction that I have 
really been telling the truth most of the time consistently, and that 
the facts regarding the "Blond Eskimo" are about as my note-books 
have them and as I originally stated them to the newspaper men, 
who did not always, however, quote me correctly, and who at times 
showed marked originality in their treatment of what I said. 

The extract from my diary set down above was written on the 
first day of my meeting with the Victoria Island Eskimo. For a 
little more than a year from that time I lived in their country and 
that of their neighbors of Coronation Gulf, until I knew most of them 
by name and had had full opportunity to make up my mind as to 
what manner of men they are. Their physical characteristics as 
I saw them I am in the habit of summarizing as follows : Of some- 
thing less than a thousand persons, ten or more have blue eyes, 
(no full-blooded Eskimo has a right to have blue eyes, as far as we 
know — his eyes should be as brown and his hair as black as those 
of the typical Chinaman) ; some of the men eradicate their beards 
(pull out the hairs by the roots, as many Indian tribes do also) ; 
but of those who have beards a good many have light-brown ones ; 
no one seen has light hair of the golden Scandinavian type, but some 
have dark-brown and rusty-red hair, the redness being usually more 
pronounced on the forehead than on the back of the head, and^per- 
haps half the entire population have eyebrows ranging from a dark 
brown to a light brown or nearly white. A few have curly hair. 

It is, however, not only the blondness of the Victoria Islanders 
that suggests the European, but also the form of their heads, as 
shown by my measurements of adult males. Typically we think 
of the Eskimo as narrow of skull and wide of face ; in other words, 
his face is wider than his head. This fact is scientifically expressed 
by a "facial index" of over 100; while if the face is narrower than 
the head, the index will be less than 100. The proportions of the 
head are considered by most anthropologists an excellent test to 
determine what race a group of individuals belong to. In a sum- 
mary published by the American Museum of Natural History, Pro- 
fessor Franz Boas gives the following facial indices for (supposedly) 
pure-blooded Eskimo : Herschel Island, 101 ; Greenland, 105 ; 
Baffin Bay, 102; Alaska, 104; East Greenland, 102; Smith Sound, 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 195 

102. In the same paper he gives the following indices for persons of 
mixed Eskimo and European descent : Labrador, 96 ; West Green- 
land, 95. My own measurements of one hundred and four men of 
Victoria Island give an index of 97, which places the "Blond Es- 
kimo," when judged by head form, exactly where it places them when 
judged by complexion — in the class with persons who are known to 
be of mixed Eskimo and white descent. 

In other words, while they are Eskimo in language and culture, 
and while some of them are Eskimo in physical appearance also, 
there are among them a large number of individuals possessing 
greater or less resemblance to white men. These are people who in 
recent time have had no contact with whites that would change 
their physical type; then whence could these European-like char- 
acters have come ? Can they be accounted for historically ? 

To understand the historic possibility of European contact with 
the central Eskimo we must go back a thousand years in the history 
of the Scandinavian countries. Shortly before 870 a.d. Iceland 
was discovered by Norwegian navigators, and a few years earlier 
some Irish monks had occupied a small island just south of Ice- 
land. The rapid settlement of Iceland was favored by the conditions 
of unrest in Scandinavia, connected with the wars of conquest waged 
by Harald, who was making himself the first king of united Norway, 
and driving out the petty kings who formerly had been independent 
rulers of separate territories, and who now generally preferred exile 
to allegiance to Harald. As is well known, some of these went to 
France, where they became the Normans who conquered England. 
Others went directly to England, and established there the kingdom 
of Northumbria. War expeditions on a smaller scale got them foot- 
ing in other parts of the British Isles, in the Orkneys, the Shetland, 
and the Faroe Islands. But perhaps the largest number of all were 
those who colonized Iceland, where the first settlement is considered 
to have been made in 872. Within a century from that time the 
entire coast line was peopled with seafaring men who spent their 
summers in piracy along the various shores of northern Europe, 
and returned to Iceland in the fall to spend the winter in the enjoy- 
ment of the fruits of their plundering. 

Early in the last quarter of the tenth century a man named Eric 



196 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the Red was outlawed from Norway for murder. He came to Ice- 
land and settled there, but the habit of man-killing was too strong 
upon him, and in 982 he was outlawed from Iceland for a period of 
three years. At that time there was current in Iceland a belief that 
a certain sailor named Gunnbjorn, of whom little is otherwise known, 
had sailed to the west of Iceland, and seen there some reefs, on which 
he had not landed. The knowledge of this tradition, combined no 
doubt with the fear of returning to the Scandinavian countries 
where he would have been an unwelcome visitor, caused Eric at 
the beginning of his exile to sail west, to become the discoverer of 
Greenland, whose glacier-covered mountains rise from the sea be- 
fore the peaks of Iceland disappear in the east. Like the naviga- 
tors of the present day, Eric found the east coast blockaded with 
floes, so he sailed to the south around Cape Farewell, and landed 
upon the more inviting southwest coast, where he spent the three 
years of his exile. On his return to Iceland he gave a favorable 
account of the country, which he had named "Greenland," for, as 
the saga naively says, "he thought people would all the more desire 
to settle the country if it had a fair name." Eric advertised his dis- 
coveries with such success that in 985 a fleet of twenty-five vessels 
sailed from the west coast of Iceland for Greenland. Some of these 
were shipwrecked, some turned back, but fourteen reached their 
destination. There is no census of the original settlers, but it is 
probable that each ship carried not less than fifty people, and the 
number can therefore be safely put at from six hundred to seven 
hundred. Each ship carried all the household goods of the owners, 
including horses, cattle, and sheep, and a flourishing farming com- 
munity soon sprang up. 

One of the important results of the settlement of Greenland was 
the discovery of the mainland of North America. Leifr Eiriksson, 
the son of Eric the Red, sailed in the year 1000 from Norway to visit 
his father in Greenland. This was in the days before exact naviga- 
tion, and in trying to find a direct route he sailed too far south, 
missed the south point of Greenland, and saw land for the first time 
in a much lower latitude than he had expected, where natural condi- 
tions showed him at once that he had struck another coast than that 
of Greenland. This was the first fully authenticated discovery of 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 197 

America, and the story of his epoch-making voyage is therefore 
so well known that we shall not dw'ell upon it here. He returned the 
same summer to Greenland, and told the story of his discovery, 
which then spread to Iceland and the rest of Europe, and found 
lodgment not only in the minds of men, but also in documents in 
various parts of Europe. 

About the year 1000 Christianity was brought to Greenland, and 
from that time on we find records of the colony, not only in the sagas 
and annals of Iceland, but also in the archives of the Holy See in 
Rome. By the twelfth century there were in Greenland a bishopric, 
two monasteries, a nunnery, and fourteen churches. The colony 
was in a flourishing condition, and cannot have had a population of 
less than three thousand ; the actual number may have been con- 
siderably more than that. They regularly paid their tithes to Rome, 
and we have papal records of the fact that in 1347 they even con- 
tributed in walrus ivory to the Crusades and to a Norwegian war 
expedition against Russia. The trade of the country was mostly 
with Norway, and besides ivory their exports were hides and thongs, 
oil, butter, wool, and other products of the farm. At first the 
Greenlanders used to sail their own vessels, and we have records of 
their making triangular voyages, going first from Greenland to the 
mainland of America to take on cargoes of timber, taking these thence 
to Iceland to sell them for house-building purposes, taking Icelandic 
wares in exchange, and returning with them to Greenland. Later 
on, however, bad times came upon the colony through the estab- 
lishment of a trade monopoly by the Norwegian king, who in 1294 
sold to a single firm of merchants in Bergen the exclusive right 
of trading with Greenland, and made it a statutory crime for the 
Greenlanders to build or sail their own ships, or to deal with any 
one not connected with this firm. In consequence the trade with 
Europe, which had been fairly brisk up to this time, gradually 
dwindled so that toward the end of the fourteenth century it was 
often several years between the sailings of ships to Greenland. 

When the Scandinavians first settled southwest Greenland they 
found there house ruins and other remains which indicated that Es- 
kimo had visited the country before its settlement. For some rea- 
son, however, these Eskimo had left the country again, and the 



198 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Scandinavians came in no contact with them during the early period 
of the colony. About the middle of the thirteenth century, however, 
they began to crowd down upon the colony from the north, appar- 
ently having come from the American continent by way of the Arctic 
islands, crossing thence to Greenland by way of Smith Sound. We 
have several accounts of the earlier fights between the Scandinavians 
and the Eskimo, and we know definitely that shortly after the year 
1341 the most northerly Scandinavian colony was destroyed. The 
last reliable accounts of the southern portion of the Scandinavian 
settlement date from the first years of the fifteenth century, although 
more doubtful accounts take this story nearly down to the year 
1500. At the time that Columbus sailed for America a bishop 
appointed by the Pope still had the nominal office of "Bishop of 
Greenland," although he never left Europe to assume his actual 
duties in the West. 

It was a combination of circumstances that finally cut off all 
communication between Bergen and Greenland. The paralysis 
that fell upon Europe as a consequence of the Black Death was 
one of the influences; raids upon Bergen by ships of the Han- 
seatic League was another. When communications with Green- 
land were resumed, Norway had lost her lead in maritime affairs, 
and it was the sailors of England who rediscovered the country. 
In 1585 John Davis sailed up into the strait which bears his name, 
and the navigators that followed him brought to the attention of 
Europe the Eskimo, who were by that time the sole inhabitants of 
the districts in which the Scandinavian colony had previously flour- 
ished. It cannot have been much more than a hundred years from 
the disappearance of the Scandinavians from Greenland to the com- 
ing of Davis, and it is certain that had the people of that time taken 
the scientific interest that modern explorers do in the things they 
saw and heard, they could have cleared up the mystery which still 
envelops the fate of the colony. Historians have always considered 
it probable that it was no war of extermination that ended the Norse 
occupation, but that one of two things happened : either the rem- 
nants of Europeans may have intermarried with the Eskimo in 
Greenland, or, more probably, they may have migrated westward to 
the portions of America so well known to their forefathers. In 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 199 

America they then either perished through starvation or by war, or 
became amalgamated with the population which they found in the 
country. 

Shortly after the announcement last fall of our discovery of 
European-like people in southwest Victoria Island, General A. W. 
Greely undertook a survey of the entire mass of Arctic literature with 
the view of finding references to previous discoveries of a similar 
nature by the early voyagers. His thorough familiarity with the 
printed sources, and the possession of manuscript documents of great 
value, enabled him to bring together many things which had pre- 
viously escaped notice, but which established a fairly complete his- 
torical chain of references to "Blond Eskimo" from the time of 
Davis to the present. The first, and perhaps the most interesting, 
reference is that to Nicolas Tunes, captain of a fishing vessel, 
who in 1656 sailed up into Davis Strait to 72° north latitude. He 
found the district which he visited occupied by two different sorts 
of people. He saw one kind which he described as very tall, well 
built, of a rather fair complexion, swift of foot ; the other was much 
smaller, with an olive complexion, and short, thick legs. The latter 
of these two types is easily recognized as the Eskimo, while the former 
would fit well a people of mixed Scandinavian and Eskimo descent, 
in whom the Scandinavian was the predominating element. Com- 
ing to more recent times and to more westerly districts, we find on 
the road which any migrating people must have travelled between 
Greenland and Victoria Island numerous references by explorers at 
various times to people whom they did not consider to be typical 
Eskimo. Sir John Franklin, who was the first of the explorers 
to approach the region in which the European-like Eskimo now live, 
came in contact in 1824 with just one Eskimo, a decrepit old man, 
abandoned by his companions, who had fled at the approach of the 
exploring party. Of him Franklin says : 

"The countenance [of this man] was oval, with a sufficiently 
prominent nose, and had nothing very different from a European 
face, except in the smallness of his eyes and, perhaps, in the narrow- 
ness of his forehead. His complexion was very fresh and red, and 
he had a longer beard than I have hitherto seen on any of the abo- 
rigines of America." 



200 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

In the same district in 1837 Dease and Simpson came in contact 
with a small party of Eskimo, one of whom they described as of 
"a distinguished appearance/' and as looking "much like a Scan- 
dinavian." 

There is no reason for insisting now or ever that the "Blond 
Eskimo" of Victoria Island are descended from the Scandinavan 
colonists of Greenland, but looking at it historically or geographically 
there is no reason why they might not be^ We have seen that the 
Scandinavians flourished for centuries on the west coast of Green- 
land. We know that at the time when communications between 
Europe and Greenland, were cut off there were still large numbers of 
them living in Greenland in proximity to the Eskimo. We know 
that the habits of the Eskimo are such, as exemplified in their rela- 
tions with the American Indian and the white man in recent times, 
that they are inclined to mix with any race with which they come in 
contact. Greenland is not far from Victoria Island. If there were 
any reason for doing so, I could go by sled in less than twenty-four 
months from the southwest corner of Victoria Island, where the 
"Blond Eskimo" now live, by way of Smith Sound, to the districts 
in Greenland which the Scandinavians inhabited, or by crossing 
from Greenland in a boat in summer I could go in one year thence 
by sled west to Victoria Island. As a matter of fact, the Eskimo 
who now winter on the ice west of Victoria Island start thence in 
March, and by August meet for trading purposes the Eskimo of 
the Hudson Bay, just above Chesterfield Inlet. There is, then, no 
more reason geographically than there is historically to suppose any 
barrier that could have kept the Scandinavians from moving west to 
Victoria Island had they wanted to. 

If the reason that the Victoria Island Eskimo are European-like 
is that they are of European blood, then the Scandinavian colony in 
Greenland furnishes not only an explanation, but the only explana- 
tion. It has been suggested in print that there may be some con- 
nection between these blond tribes and the English explorers of the 
Arctic islands. A sufficient lack of information might make this 
supposition seem probable. It is true, however, that the literature 
of the Franklin expeditions not only is fairly complete, but also that 
the Eskimo themselves still remember such contact as they had 




OuK Camp in the Interior of Victoria Island. 




Coming Home from a Successful Bearded Seal Hunt — Each Dog dragging 
A Segment of the Seal. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 201 

with the explorers. Of all tribes visited by us only three were shown 
by our literature to have come in contact with the explorers, and in 
all these three tribes I found men still living who remembered the 
incident. The extracts already quoted show that when the first 
Englishmen came in contact with these people, they found already 
among them exactly the same blond traits that we find to-day, and 
secondly, the amount of contact was so slight that no physical change 
of whole tribes could have been produced. Had Franklin's entire 
ship's company of two hundred and thirty men survived in Victoria 
Island, and had they all married among and lived among the Eskimo, 
their descendants could not have been numerous enough to give us 
the condition we find there to-day. We have records, however, of 
the actual death of more than half of Franklin's men, and we feel 
certain that they had all perished before the year 1860 at the latest. 
It is over a hundred years since the Eskimo of western Alaska 
came in contact with the early Russians. I For half a century they 
have been in contact with the American whaling fleet, numbering 
at times as many as a thousand men.,} A good many of these whalers 
have married Eskimo women and have settled in the country, and 
their grandchildren are already growing into man's estate; yet all 
this mixing of races has produced in northern Alaska no such blond 
type as we find in Victoria Island, There are living in northern Alaska 
and the Mackenzie district perhaps a hundred individuals of mixed 
European and Eskimo descent. If this hundred were gathered to- 
gether in one place, it would be found that many of them could not 
be distinguished offhand from full-blooded Eskimo, and the group 
as a whole would by no means present so north-European an appear- 
ance as would any of the three tribes in southwest Victoria Island. 
And then it is to be noted that if recent admixture of European blood 
were the cause of the blondness of the Victoria Island Eskimo, you 
would expect to find more blondness the farther east you go, because 
the European contact would have to be supposed to have come from 
the direction of Hudson Bay. The fact is, however, that the blond 
type is most pronounced farthest west, and gradually fades the far- 
ther east you go toward Hudson Bay. I have not myself seen the 
Eskimo of Hudson Bay, who have for more than a century been 
in contact with the Scotch and American whalers; but Captain 



202 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

George Comer, of East Haddam, Connecticut, who has had deahngs 
with them continuously for more than a quarter of a century, has 
told me that such European-like appearance of the people as I have 
described for Victoria Island and as my photographs show is quite 
beyond anything he has seen before even in those tribes which have 
been most intimately connected with the whalers. 

As for the contact of the Victoria Island Eskimo with the American 
whalers, there is little to be said. Only one out of the thirteen tribes 
visited by my party had ever been seen by whalers, and they were 
first seen by the schooner Olga in 1906, when she wintered behind 
Bell Island near the southwest corner of Victoria Island. They were 
re-visited by the Olga in 1908, but by no other ship, and the total 
contact of the Olga's crew with the people did not amount to a 
whole week of continuous association. 

Apart from the historical explanation, there are, of course, purely 
biological ones. It is possible that for some so-called "accidental" 
reason blond individuals may have been born from time to time in 
the past from parents of pure Eskimo blood, and that these may 
have perpetuated themselves. As to supposing that it is the climate 
that has made the Victoria Island Eskimo blond, the theory would 
be hardly tenable, for they live on the same food and under the 
same climatic conditions as do the Eskimo east of them and west 
of them, none of whom show the same European-like traits. 



CHAPTER XIII 

AS we proceeded east along Dolphin and Union Straits from 
Cape Bexley, we found here and there traces of Eskimo 
parties who were going in from their winter hunt on the sea 
ice to cache their clothing, household property, and stores of oil on 
the beach preparatory to moving inland for their summer caribou 
hunt. Some of these groups we never saw at all ; the trails of others 
we picked up and followed until we overtook the parties, who were 
usually camped on the shore of a small lake, where they were fishing 
with hooks through holes they had made with their ice-picks in the 
seven-foot-thick ice. The caribou in this district are scarce in spring 
and. difiicult to get by the hunting methods of the Eskimo. Fish 
were not secured in large numbers, either, for these people know 
nothing of nets. Our archaeological investigations have shown us 
that the knowledge of fishing by nets never extended farther east 
along the north shore of the mainland than Cape Parry, and the 
Copper Eskimo have no method of catching fish except that of 
hooks and spears. The hooks are, like most of their weapons, made 
of native copper. They are unsuited for setting, for there is no barb, 
and unless the fish be pulled out of the water as soon as he takes the 
hook he is sure to get off again. 

West of Cape Bexley we had seen no traces of caribou for a hun- 
dred and fifty miles, but as soon as we came to where the straits began 
to narrow, east of Cape Bexlej^, we began to find more and more 
frequently the tracks of the northward migrating bands of cow cari- 
bou bound for Victoria Island. At first we did not see on an average 
more than ten or fifteen animals a day, but later on they increased 
in number ; and with our excellent rifles we found not the slightest 
difficulty in supplying ourselves with plenty of venison and in having 
enough to spare to feed also the people at whose villages we visited. 

In coming to the coast from the south, caribou take the ice with- 
out hesitation. It cannot be that they see land to the north of the 

203 



204 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

straits, for half of the time, at least, the land is hidden in a haze, 
even from the human eye, which is far keener than that of the cari- 
bou. Neither can it be the sense of smell that guides them, for the 
northward direction of their march is not interfered with by change 
of wind. They will sometimes go ten miles out on the ice and lie 
down there, then wander around in circles for several hours or half 
a day, and finally proceed north again. Both at Liston and Sutton 
islands, in Simpson Bay, and farther east at Lambert Island, we saw 
caribou march right past without paying any attention to the 
islands, although there was food upon them, and they in some cases 
passed within a hundred yards or so. The bands would generally 
be from five to twelve caribou, consisting in the main of females 
about to drop their fawns, but also of yearlings and two-year-olds 
of both sexes. All of them were skin-poor and the marrow in their 
bones was as blood, but we had with us plenty of seal oil from seals 
killed farther west along the coast, so that the two together made a 
satisfactory diet. The skins at this season of the year are worth- 
less, partly because the hair is loose, but also because they are full 
of holes, ranging in size from that of a pea to that of a navy bean, 
from the grubs of the bot-fly which infest the backs of the animals. 
When spread out to dry, the skin of the spring-killed caribou looks 
like a sieve. 

; In general, we tried to get a man from each party we came upon to 
accompany us to the next party or village so as to introduce us prop- 
erly and guard against possible mishap, but when it happened that 
no one was with us when we came to a village, we always had to go 
through the formality of standing outside the house until some one 
could get a little blubber, cut it in pieces, and let each of us swallow 
one piece. This, as has been explained before, is the ordinary test 
to determine whether the visitor is human or a spirit, for it is a well- 
know^act that spirits will not swallow blubber. We found the people 
everywhere, when this formality was over, uniformly hospitable 
and glad to see us. They were especially glad we came at this time 
of year, for the fishing was precarious and most of them were on short 
rations. Commonly my Eskimo would pitch our camp, while 
I myself went a mile or two off in search of caribou. On hearing 
the report of my rifle a sledge would come from the village for the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 205 

meat. Although the bands of caribou were small, by careful shoot- 
ing I was in some cases able to save ammunition by aligning two and 
getting both in one shot. I found that if you get the animals in a 
line, the soft-pointed bullet of the six and one half millimeter Mann- 
licher-Schoenauer will, in spite of its mushrooming, still have killing 
force after going through the body of the first caribou. In some 
cases, however, the force of the bullet was completely spent against 
the vertebrae of large animals. 

To get to Coronation Gulf two routes were open to us : one to 
follow Dolphin and Union Straits east around Cape Krusenstern, 
and the other to go south overland from the neighborhood of Lam- 
bert Island to Basil Hall Bay, the western arm of Coronation Gulf. 
We chose this latter method to save time, for spring was approaching. 
We knew by experience that in the Mackenzie district most of 
the snow is generally gone from the ground by the last week in May, 
Here, however, the season was so much later that there was scarcely 
a sign of thaw as we crossed overland, reaching Basil Hall Bay on 
May 28th. Some Eskimo whom we found here were living exclu- 
sively on tomcod and getting about half enough to eat, but all were 
in the best of spirits. 

At this point I had hard luck in hunting. After assuring the 
village that it would be an easy matter for me to go out and get meat 
for them, I spent a day in climbing up and scrambling down basaltic 
precipices in a vain search for even the tracks of caribou in the fresh 
snow. Of course my inability to get food for them meant also our 
own inability to get food for ourselves, and Basil Hall Bay was 
therefore a place where we could not tarry. After a day's fruitless 
hunt, we accordingly hitched up our dogs and proceeded south upon 
the ice of Coronation Gulf to where there was promise of finding 
seals. 

It was now daylight the twenty-four hours through, and early 
the next morning we simultaneously sighted Eskimo and a seal 
basking on the ice. It is a curious thing that the art of harpooning 
seals on the ice is practiced almost not at all by these Eskimo. Al- 
though they were short of provisions and the seal lay in plain sight, 
no one in camp thought it worth while going after him, for no one 
present had practice in that sort of hunting. In general, among 



206 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the Copper Eskimo I should say that not more than one man in six 
knows how to hunt seals on the spring ice, and the ones who know 
are chiefly old men. The whole family, therefore, looked on with 
great interest as my Alaskan companion Natkusiak crawled up 
to within about twenty yards of this seal and shot him. At this 
season of the year the seals were lying on top of the ice basking in 
the warm sun. You see them here and there like small black 
dots sprinkled over the vast whiteness of the ocean. Each is 
lying beside a hole through which he has all winter been getting 
his supply of fresh air, which he has kept open all winter by continual 
gnawing, and which he has now enlarged from the two inches that 
were necessary to give air space to his nostrils in winter to perhaps 
a foot and a half in diameter, so that he can haul himself on top of 
the ice. He is lying on a slippery incline beside this hole, and the 
least twitch of his body will slide him into the water. He must, 
therefore, be approached and killed before he has suspicion of danger, 
and he must be killed instantly, for the quiver of a flipper would be 
almost as effective as the most energetic movement in sliding his 
body into the water. ; 

The family whom we found here differed not at all from the gen- 
erality of their countrymen in being more impressed with my com- 
panion's skill in stalking, which they thoroughly understood, than 
by the performances of his rifle, which to them were miraculous and 
therefore no more wonderful than ordinary miracles. There were 
three tents altogether, occupied by an old man with his wife and 
young son, and by his married son and married daughter. Eskimo 
differ exactly as we do, and this family was one of the most agree- 
able whom we had met. Later in the summer we fell in with them 
again and were together with them an aggregate of several weeks. 

Proceeding south, we came in the night to a small village at the 
mouth of the Rae River. Every one was asleep, and the Eskimo 
dogs, as was their custom, came up to us with wagging tails, and never 
barked, giving their masters no warning. I let one of my men go up 
to the tent and shout from the outside that visitors had come, and 
in the excitement most of the men and all of the children came run- 
ning out naked to see what it was all about. Although the season 
was advancing rapidly and I knew the snow would soon be gone 




Ekalukpik. 
In 1848, when a boy of about six, he saw Richardson's party at Rae River. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 207 

from the land and make sled travel impossible, we stayed at this 
camp a day. I was especially anxious to make definite inquiries, 
for here at last we had come upon a tribe who should have some 
knowledge of white men, for I knew from the records of English ex- 
plorers that Dease and Simpson had visited them in the thirties and 
Richardson and Rae in the forties of the last century. 

After we had breakfasted together I therefore asked them what 
they knew of white men. Oh, they knew a great deal, they said. 
A few years ago a single Eskimo family of a tribe other than theirs 
had seen white men on a lake farther inland to the south. This lake 
I was easily able to identify as Dismal Lake, and the party of course 
was Hanbury's in 1904. But hadn't they themselves seen white 
men, I asked them. No, they never had, and were sure white men 
had never been in their country, but they knew a great deal about 
white men other than Hanbury by hearsay from tribes to the east. 
These that I questioned were all people under middle age. The one 
old man of the village did not happen to be present. A little later 
when he came to our tent I asked him the same question. 

Oh, yes, he had seen white men. He had seen them when he was 
a small boy and he well remembered the occasion. He said that his 
parents and other people had been encamped exactly where we were 
now and that white men had come from the north without boats 
and wanted to cross the river; that the Eskimo had made rafts 
by lashing several of their kayaks together and had ferried the white 
men over. This coincided exactly with Dr. Richardson's account 
of his crossing the river in 1848. Further, the width at the point 
where we were camped coincided with that given in Richardson's 
narrative, whereas had the crossing been half a mile farther down or 
half a mile farther up-stream, the width of the river would have 
been entirely different. I then asked the younger generation why 
they had not told me this. Their answer was : "We did not know; 
we did not see it." "But didn't you hear?" Oh, yes, they had 
heard, but they had heard so many things. 

This case illustrates well the difficulty of learning things from the 
Eskimo. In general, they are willing to tell, but nevertheless 
they don't seem to realize what it is that you want to learn. But 
the real explanation of the difficulty is that so many wonderful things 



208 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

happen to them continually that all the different wonders take a 
dead level and none stand out above the others. Suppose, for in- 
stance, that some of these people might (as they did not) have made 
a five-hundred-mile journey east in 1903 to visit Captain Amundsen 
at King William Island. They would have seen a ship in size quite 
beyond their comprehension, and marvelous things without end; 
and when they came back home they would have told about these 
things and their stories would have been listened to with interest. 
The men themselves would have been centers of attraction for some 
time, but soon after their return some powerful magician would 
have had occasion to visit the white man's land in a spirit flight, 
and on his magical return would have told still more wonderful stories 
than were told by those who had actually seen Amundsen's party, 
and the stories would have been listened to with equal interest and 
would quickly after have taken their places in the minds and memories 
of the people. And then another shaman would have taken a journey 
to the moon and on his return would have told about the curious 
people he had seen and their strange customs. In his turn he would 
have been believed and would have had his day, as people have their 
day in the newspapers of our country. A few years later if I came 
to visit these people and asked them to relate to me the important 
things they knew, they would tell me of the journey to King William 
Island, of the journey to the white men's land, and the journey to the 
moon with equal impressiveness, putting them all on a dead level 
and leaving me dependent entirely upon my own resources in deter- 
mining which of the stories was fact and which fiction. Among 
themselves the comparatively tame experiences of the people who 
really saw Amundsen would soon be lost and forgotten in the wealth 
of adventure and extraordinary detail of the miraculous journeys 
that had since been made to stranger and more distant places. 

We entered the mouth of the Coppermine River June 4th and 
found the ice lying smooth, snow-covered, and white as in midwinter. 
This all looked well, but the aspect of things changed suddenly 
when we reached Bloody Fall. In itself this is one of the most pic- 
turesque spots in the Northland and historically it is the center of 
the story of the North, for this is the point reached by Samuel Hearne 
in 1771, when, accompanied by a horde of Chipewyan Indians, he 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 209 

made this the turning-point of one of the most remarkable expedi- 
tions ever undertaken on the mainland of North America. It was 
here that the Chipewyans, cowardly in general but brave under the 
circumstances, attacked some tents occupied by a dozen or so Es- 
kimo who were sleeping and killed them all. This gave the sinister 
name of Bloody Fall to the basaltic gorge through which the Copper- 
mine was now rushing, open as though in summer except for a narrow, 
somewhat sloping ledge of ice, in places not more than two yards 
wide, that still clung to the rock along the west side of the gorge 
and gave us a doubtful footpath along a shelf overhanging one of the 
deadliest rapids in the world. 

It was, perhaps, unwise of us to decide not to portage the six 
hundred odd paces around the falls and to attempt this ice ledge 
instead. I was not sure it was safe — I am now sure it was entirely 
unsafe — but we managed to get past without accident. Of course, 
if there had been an accident it could only have been a fatal one, 
because it would have consisted in the breaking down of the ice ledge 
along which we were sledging, and that would have been the last 
of us, for immediately below the falls the river plunges under the ice. 
It has often been the case with us, and so it was here, that at exciting 
moments we forgot all about our camera. When we had an ad- 
venture it took all of us to have it, and we could spare no one to stand 
aside and push the button. 

We had agreed with the Rae River Eskimo that we would meet 
them on Dismal Lake, and it was therefore our idea to keep to the 
west side of the Coppermine, so that whenever we found further 
progress impossible on account of the approaching summer we should 
be able to leave our sled on that side of the river and walk overland 
southwest to Dismal Lake. A mile and a half above the fall, how- 
ever, it appeared that the going was so much better on the east side 
of the stream that we crossed over and proceeded along that bank 
for three or four miles. It was a very warm day, the sun beat down 
incessantly from a clear sky, and about six miles above Bloody 
Fall we found progress on that side of the stream impossible on ac- 
count of the increasing water on top of the ice and the absence of 
snow from the land. We then tried to cross over, but found that 
the water, which farther downstream had been flowing like a small 



210 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

river on top of the ice, had here dug its way clean through the ice and 
had become an impassable open channel. On realizing this we turned 
downstream again, but found that a few hours had made so much 
difference that while our crossing to the east side had been safe in 
the morning, our return was impossible in the afternoon. The river 
was now open and uncrossable the whole six miles back to Bloody- 
Fall. We were caught on the east side of the river in a district un- 
frequented at present by Eskimo, poorly supplied with game, and 
one in which we had no interest ; while the promised hunting-land, 
the summer country of the Eskimo, lay across the river to the west, 
completely out of our reach, for the Coppermine River is practically 
a series of rapids, and during the spring freshets attempting to cross 
it by raft would be suicidal, as the strips of quiet water between the 
rapids are so few that a raft would be inevitably swept into the next 
rapid below before it could be paddled across. 

We had not been able to quite reach the tree-line by sled. It 
had been my intention to hide the sled somewhere in a clump of trees 
for fear the Eskimo might find it during the summer and break it 
up to secure the iron runners. Of course I had no fear of those Es- 
kimo with whom we had come in contact, for they would know whose 
sled it was and would respect it accordingly ; but I had reason to think 
that wandering bands from the east might come upon our cache, 
and might consider it a windfall. The tree-line, however, was 
three miles away, so we merely portaged our sleds and our stuff to 
the top of the hill, and cached them in a small hollow where they 
could be seen from no great distance. 

I left my Eskimo to do this work and struck out at once east- 
ward to hunt. Tracks of caribou were found on every one of the 
few spots that were soft enough to preserve a track, — in the soft 
mud where there was mud, in the snowbanks where they still existed 
in the shelter of the hills, and on top of the ice in the creek bottoms ; 
but in general the country is solid rock, which leaves no trace of the 
passing of man or beast. All the tracks led west along the Copper- 
mine ; few of them were less than two weeks old, and none were quite 
fresh. Under ordinary circumstances one of us went out to hunt 
and did not return without securing game, although sometimes that 
was a task that ran a good deal beyond the twenty-four hours ; but 




Cooking with Heathek in Sprinc;. 




Cooking with Dwarf Willows in Speing on the Shore of Frozen Lake. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 211 

in this case I thought it best that we should proceed up the Copper- 
mine to the forested area at once, for I considered the chances of 
finding caribou there a little better than out on the barren ground. 

After a half-dozen hours of vain search, therefore, I returned. 
One of the Eskimo meantime had secured a few squirrels (Sper- 
mophilus parryi). Ptarmigan were fairly numerous, but our ammuni- 
tion was too valuable to use it on them except in an emergency. 
We prepared for leaving behind everything except a portion of our 
ammunition and cooking-gear. I cached even my camera and my 
large diary, with the idea that in a few days we would have occasion 
to return to the cache, and I took with me only a small pocket note- 
book. 

We started south late in the afternoon, and about two hours later 
we reached, in a driving shower which was the first rain of the summer, 
the most northerly clump of trees on the Coppermine, about eight- 
een miles south of the ocean. Under ordinary circumstances we 
should have proceeded farther, but a rain-storm is much more dis- 
agreeable than a snow-storm, so we pitched our tent and made in 
front of it a roaring wood fire that defied the rain. 

The next morning Natkusiak and myself started out to look for 
caribou, while Tannaumirk and Pannigabluk remained behind to 
snare squirrels and ptarmigan. There are a great many small streams 
that flow into the Coppermine from the east that can well be forded 
in late summer, when most of them are not knee-deep, but at this 
season every one of them was impassable, so Natkusiak and I 
were limited in our movements rather strictly by the topography. 
I must have gone perhaps fifteen or eighteen miles northeast before 
I got beyond the head of most of these small creeks and was able 
to circle to the north and west. I saw no game, however, and after 
perhaps fifteen or eighteen hours of walking I had returned within 
four or five miles of camp when I saw an Arctic hare. These animals 
are really not so very rare on the barren ground, as one may see by 
their traces left on the snow in winter, but in my entire Arctic experi- 
ence I have seen only four or five, and have never shot a single one. 
Where caribou are plenty, of course a hare is not worth the ammuni- 
tion, but in this case I made up my mind to try to get the animal, 
and I followed him a few hundred yards. 



212 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

I was about to shoot, and he was so near that there was no doubt 
of the result, when suddenly, almost in line with the hare, I saw a 
caribou disappearing over a ridge. He evidently had seen me while 
my attention was concentrated on the hare and while I was exposed 
against the sky-line on top of the rock ridge along which the hare 
was running. Of course I gave no further thought to the hare. Cari- 
bou, when they merely see a man and do not get his wind, ordinarily 
do not run far, and within an hour I had come up to this one again. 
It turned out I had seen only one of two animals, both of which I 
now found quietly feeding upon a level spot — so level, indeed, that 
it took several hours of careful stalking before I got within range. 
The animals proved to be two* young bulls, skin-poor, with the mar- 
row as blood in their bones. Nevertheless there was great rejoicing 
in camp when I returned, after being out about twenty-four hours, 
with a back-load of caribou meat. I have found that Eskimo in 
a strange country are typically sceptical of the possibilities of finding 
food, and my people had several days ago made up their minds that 
all the caribou had left the district and we were destined to have 
to live the whole summer on squirrels and ptarmigan. 

Natkusiak had not yet returned when I got home, and it was 
nearly another twenty-four hours before he put in an appearance, 
but he had been more successful than I in securing three old bull 
caribou which were in fair condition at this season of the year, and 
best of all he had shot a wolf that was as fat as a pig. In summer 
we much preferred wolf meat to caribou, for it is usually tender and 
fat, and the caribou, all except the oldest bulls, are in very indifferent 
condition. We never ate venison when there was wolf meat to be 
had at this season ; at least that was true of all of us except Panni- 
gabluk, to whose family and ancestors the wolf is taboo. 

As the caribou killed by Natkusiak were in a southeasterly direc- 
tion, we brought into camp at once the meat of the two that I had 
killed, and then proceeded farther upstream to a point from which 
it was only seven or eight miles to where Natkusiak had cached the 
other meat. We learned that at this season the caribou in the 
Coppermine country were all bulls, and none of them were moving. 
In general singly, or by twos and threes, they had taken possession 
of some snow-bank protected from the sun by a northward-facing 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 213 

precipice, and there they stayed. They would feed for an hour or 
two on the grass or moss in the neighborhood, and then go back to 
He on the snow, where they had a measure of protection from the 
clouds of mosquitoes, and where the intense heat of the sun was more 
bearable to them. 

On an average the number of caribou was not more than about 
one for every hundred square miles of country, and we always had 
to go south to kill the next one. Occasionally either Natkusiak 
or myself would hunt back downstream twenty or thirty miles, with 
the idea that caribou might have moved in behind us, but with no 
result; and each time we killed a caribou to the south and moved 
up to get its meat we got that much farther from our sled cache and 
from my camera and writing materials; so that by the latter part 
of June it had become evident that we should never be able to go 
back to the cache during the summer, for to go back meant starva- 
tion. By killing the caribou as we went we had burned our bridges 
behind us. 

Later on, after we had succeeded in joining the Eskimo, there was 
scarcely a half-hour when some picturesque or unusual scene in their 
lives during the summer did not bring back to me the absence of my 
camera. As for my diary for the summer, it was written in my 
small pocket notebook in so microscopic a hand that it is difficult 
to read without a magnifying glass, and even so I had to trust to 
my memory for many things that in ordinary course I should have 
recorded. 

' July was intolerably hot. We had no thermometer, but I feel 
sure that many a day the temperature must have been over one hun- 
dred degrees in the sun, and sometimes for weeks on end there was 
not a cloud in the sky. At midnight the sun was what we would 
call an hour high, so that it beat down on us without rest the twenty- 
four hours through. The hottest period of the day was about eight 
o'clock in the evening, and the coolest perhaps four or five in the 
morning. The mosquitoes were so bad that several of our dogs 
went completely blind for the time, through the swelling closed of 
their eyes,j and all of them were lame from running sores caused by 
the mosquito stings on the line where the hair meets the pad of the 
foot. It is true that on our entire expedition we had no experience 



214 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

that more nearly deserved the name of suffering than this of the 
combined heat and mosquitoes of our Coppermine River summer. 

By the last week in July we had proceeded upstream as far as 
the mouth of the Kendall River, which flows in from the west from 
Dismal Lake. We had continually been putting off the crossing of 
the river, hoping to find a better place, and also being in no hurry, 
for we did not think the Rae River Eskimo whom we wanted to join 
would reach Dismal Lake before early August. We finally selected 
for the crossing a strip of river where there is half a mile of quiet 
water between two strong rapids, built a raft from dry spruce grow- 
ing near the river, and got across with all our belongings, including 
at that time about three hundred pounds of dry caribou meat. 
Immediately upon landing on the west side we cached the meat 
safely in a rock crevice, under huge stones, intending it for a store 
against some future emergency, but our fortunes that summer never 
brought us back to the place again ; so doubtless it is there yet unless 
some wandering Eskimo may have happened to find it. 

On the north shore of Dismal Lake, which we reached in a two- 
days march from the Coppermine, we ran completely out of food for 
the only time in our period of fourteen months of absence from our 
base at Langton Bay. Of course, in an extremity we could have 
gone back to where we had cached the dried meat two days before, 
but our general policy was never to retreat, for we knew well that 
the chances of food ahead were always a little better than behind. 
The morning of July 29th I broke the rule against shooting ptarmigan, 
and used one of my valuable Mannlicher-Schoenauer bullets to se- 
cure half a pound of meat. That half-pound was the breakfast for 
the four of us, and the dogs, poor fellows, got nothing. But our 
fortune was soon to turn, for when immediately after breakfast 
I climbed the high hill behind our camp I saw a caribou coming from 
the north and disappearing among some hills to the east in a way to 
make it uncertain in just what direction he was going. The three 
of us therefore started to meet him by different routes. It happened 
that I was the one to get sight of him first, and it turned out he had 
a companion that must evidently have preceded him into the hills 
a moment before I turned my field glasses that way. The two of 
them were in good flesh, so that by four in the afternoon both our- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 215 

selves and our dogs had had a square meal of better meat than ordi- 
nary. 

Dismal Lake is incorrectly given on the maps as three separate 
lakes, connected by rivers. As a matter of fact, it is one lake ex- 
tending in a general east-and-west direction, with a length of about 
thirty-six miles, and the width varying from four or more miles down 
to a hundred yards or so. At the point where we struck the lake it is 
filled with willow-covered islands. Here we knew from Eskimo 
report that a ford existed, but the Eskimo who cross by it every year 
put up no guide-posts, and no trails are visible, so that it took me 
half a day of wading back and forth before the ford was discovered. 
I had chosen this job as rather more interesting than hunting, and 
expected it to take me only a few minutes, so I had sent the two Es- 
kimo off to hunt while I looked for the ford. While I was at it and 
wading about nearly neck-deep in the cold water a sudden cold rain- 
storm came up which quickly brought the Eskimo back from their cari- 
bou hunt to our comfortable tent, while it of course did not restrain me 
from my search for the ford, as I was already soaked to the neck. 
It was rather a cheerless job, and one of which I was thoroughly tired 
both physically and mentally, when eventually, after perhaps four 
hours of wading, I found the ford. It turned out to be not more 
than waist-deep, but involved about half a mile of wading. The next 
day it took us several hours to make the crossing of the lake, for the 
dogs, which ordinarily carried a large part of our gear, of course were 
of no use in fording the channels from island to island. 

This fording of the lake took place on the last day of July, and 
the 1st of August, a little east of the middle of Dismal Lake, we 
came upon a camp of those particular families of the Rae River 
Eskimo whom we had met in May. In their company we moved 
south to the headwaters of the Dease River, where the caribou hunt- 
ing-camps of the Eskimo are scattered on every other hill. This 
is one of the most cosmopolitan communities of Eskimo in America, 
for they come here from great distances to secure wood for sled-mak- 
ing and for the wooden portions of their weapons. There were two 
or three families from Dolphin and Union Straits as far west as Cape 
Bexley; there were several families from Victoria Island, and two 
or three from the east coast of Bathurst Inlet. The gathering there 



216 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

represented people from a territory five' hundred miles in length 
from east to west, and two hundred or more miles wide from north 
to south. Some of the camps were pitched within a few miles of the 
shore of Bear Lake, and the oldest men there told us a rather surpris- 
ing thing : that from their infancy they and their countrymen had 
every year been in the habit of hunting down to the northeast shore 
of Bear Lake. This is extraordinary in view of the fact that Bear 
Lake has been a sort of Mecca for the explorers of the North for a 
hundred years, and the Hudson's Bay Company has had a station 
at Fort Norman for a century ; and yet neither these explorers nor 
the Hudson's Bay Company, nor even yet the Bear Lake Indians, 
realized that a large body of Eskimo hunted on the shores of the 
lake every year. True, every few years frightened Slavey or Dogrib 
Indians would come to the Hudson's Bay Company's post with stories 
of having found traces of the dreaded Eskimo, but it was believed 
that these were but small wandering bands who had come a great 
way from their country, which was vaguely supposed to be at a vast 
distance to the northeast. 

In 1908, Dr. Anderson and I had come down a portion of the 
Mackenzie River with the English travelers CD. Melvill and John 
Hornby, whose guests we had been aboard their boat all the way 
from Fort Smith to Fort Norman, a distance of over eight hundred 
miles. They had told me that they expected to spend the winter of 
1909-1910 on Bear Lake. I had intended to spend that same winter 
with the Copper Eskimo, and we had arranged to try to meet on 
the Coppermine River ; but I had been delayed in my plans a year, 
and although I had seen traces of their encampments on the Copper- 
mine River, I supposed them to be by now back in England. How- 
ever, I thought it worth while to have a look to see if they might 
not still be on Bear Lake. With this in view, Natkusiak and I made 
the journey to the mouth of the Dease River. We found no human 
traces less than apparently a year old, but we left, nevertheless, 
a letter in a tin can suspended from a pole in a conspicuous place at 
the mouth of the river, hoping that some wandering Indians might 
pick it up and eventually carry it to the Hudson's Bay post at Fort 
Norman, three hundred miles away. 

On our return journey from Bear Lake I was one morning sur- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 217 

prised to see on the sky-line a party who evidently were not Eskimo. 
We hastened to intercept them, and found them to be Slavey In- 
dians, one of whom spoke fairly good English. They had been to 
the northward hunting caribou, and with a vague notion that they 
wanted to go farther than usual on the chance of seeing Eskimo. 
Two days before we saw them, when they had found traces of Eskimo, 
they had completely lost their desire to see them. Their courage 
had suddenly given out, and they were now in full retreat. When 
they learned, however, that we had been spending several months 
with the Eskimo and had found them to be very friendly, the English- 
speaking Slavey, who gave his name as Jimmie Soldat, told me that 
he was in the service of my friend Hornby ; that Hornby had told him 
to keep a lookout for me, and to assist me in every way he could, 
and that Hornby had further requested that I take Jimmie in hand 
and bring him in contact with the Eskimo, so that later Jimmie 
might be able to guide Hornby to the place where the Eskimo are. 

Now I did not desire to bring my unspoiled Coronation Gulf 
people into contact with civilization, with the ravages of which among 
the Eskimo of Alaska and the Mackenzie I am too familiar; but 
it seemed that the thing could not be staved off for more than a 
year or two, anyway, for the fact of my living with the Eskimo 
was alread}^ well known, and both the traders and missionaries who 
operate through Fort Norman would be sure to make use of the in- 
formation. While I regretted the event in general, I was glad to be 
able to do a service, as I thought, to my friends Melvill and Hornby ; 
so next day I took Jimmie and two of his Slavey companions to within 
a mile or two of an Eskimo encampment, and left them there in hid- 
ing behind a hill while I went to the Eskimo to ask their permission 
to bring the Indians into camp. 

At first the Eskimo refused flatly. They said that they them- 
selves had never had anything to do with the Indians; that their 
ancestors had had but rare contact with them, and that this contact 
had never been friendly ; that sometimes Indians had killed some of 
them and sometimes they had killed some Indians, and that now no 
doubt these Indians had treacherous intentions in wanting to be 
introduced into camp. Through our long residence with them, how- 
ever, Natkusiak and I had their confidence so fully that we finally 



218 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

talked them into allowing the Indians to come, on the condition that 
they leave their weapons behind them. 

When I returned to Jimmie with this ultimatum, the Indians in 
their turn said that the intentions of the Eskimo were clear : that 
they intended to get them unarmed into their clutches and murder 
them, and Jimmie would have nothing more of the adventure. His 
backing out at this stage, however, did not suit me, for the Eskimo 
were sure to take that as a sign of treachery, and it would not have 
been a day until every Eskimo party in the neighborhood was on 
its way to the coast in a retreat in which they would have abandoned 
their sleds, their skins intended for clothing, and through which we 
would lose prestige by having brought this calamity upon them. 
Natkusiak and I therefore took the Indians practically by force into 
camp, threatening them with all sorts of dire results if they backed 
out. The Eskimo's reception of the Indians was friendly. The 
Indians were dressed in white men's clothing, and were not at all 
what the Eskimo had expected Indians to be like ; and in fact several 
of them said to me at once that had they known the Indians were 
like this they would not have been so frightened of them. 

This was early September, and the nights were dark at midnight. 
We had brought the Indians to camp about sundown, and an hour 
later, when supper had been eaten, the Eskimo invited the Indians 
to come and sleep in their tents ; but this the Indians would not do, 
saying that it was their custom to sit beside the fire. This seemed 
to the Eskimo a strange thing, but to me it was a self-evident fib. 
The Indians were simply too frightened to trust themselves in the 
dwellings of the Eskimo. Natkusiak and I therefore sat up with 
the Indians for an hour or two until all the Eskimo were sound 
asleep, and then finally, by lying down one on either side, we got the 
Indians to go to sleep between us. The next morning after break- 
fast the Indians invited the Eskimo to accompany them down to 
their lodges, where they had considerable quantities of smoked 
caribou meat, caribou fat, and marrow-bones. Seven of the Eskimo 
went, including two women, and much of the forenoon was spent in 
the commodious lodges of the Slaveys in feasting and in exchanging 
opinions, in all of which I had to act as interpreter. 

Finally when the feast was over and the Eskimo were appar- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 219 

ently in the best of spirits, Jimmie brought forward a package of 
pictures of saints and holy men, and made a httle speech in which 
he asked me to tell the Eskimo that he was an ambassador of a 
bishop of the Roman Catholic Church, and that the bishop said that 
if they were good men and never killed any more Indians and ab- 
jured their heathenish practices, he would come and build a mission 
among them and would convert them to the true faith. This speech, 
which meant so much to the Indian, would of course have meant 
nothing to the Eskimo, for they had never heard of the good bishop 
or of the faith he preaches. Jimmie went on to say that he had a 
picture for each of them, and that if they would take them and wear 
them over their hearts, the pictures would protect them from all 
evil and be of the greatest value to them. Without translating any 
of these things, I took the pictures, which were the ordinary religious 
chromos, and gave them to the Eskimo. 

It turned out that Jimmie had had no commission from Hornby, 
and that he had merely, from overhearing Melvill's and Hornby's 
conversation, found out that I was a friend of theirs, and he had used 
this knowledge in a confidence game of his own, the object of which 
was to become the first Indian who had been in friendly contact 
with the Eskimo, that he might thereafter pride himself on that 
fact, and might be able to represent himself to the bishop as having 
been a pioneer in the spread of the faith among the Eskimo. Ap- 
parently the results have been what he desired, for I have since heard 
that the Roman Catholic Church sent in missionaries at once, who 
arrived among the Eskimo soon after we left them, and whose work 
in that field will no doubt continue indefinitely. 

Among other things, Jimmie told me that Melvill and Hornby 
were somewhere on Great Bear Lake. This was good news, and 
from that time I was continually on the lookout for some signs of 
them. Finally, on the 13th of September, it happened that the pur- 
suit of a large band of bull caribou had taken me a long distance 
away from our camp, and when I finally shot three of the animals 
it was on a slope of a hill facing the southwest. While I was skinning 
them I happened to look in the direction of Bear Lake, which lay 
some fifteen miles distant, and there, not more than a mile away, 
was pitched a tepee. I took this for an Indian camp, but went up 



220 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

to it to make inquiries about my friends, and it turned out to be their 
camp. They had a day or two before heard from Jimmie about my 
presence in the country, and were also looking for me. They had 
been down on the Mackenzie River in the summer, and had some 
news of the outside world. King Edward was dead, and a heavier 
than air flying-machine had crossed the English Channel. This 
news, not half a year old, was fresh news indeed in that country. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE summer spent with the Copper Eskimo between Bear 
Lake and the Coppermine River had passed pleasantly for 
me, and profitably. From the first they had accepted me 
as one of them — they had not known that I was a white man until 
I told them so. My life was exactly as theirs in that I followed the 
game and hunted for a living. Even my rifle did not differentiate 
me from them, because they looked upon its performances as my 
magic, differing in no way essentially from their magic. I spoke the 
Mackenzie Eskimo dialect and made no attempt to learn theirs, for 
it was not necessary for convenience' sake, and it would have thor- 
oughly confused me to try to keep two so similar dialects separate in 
my mind. Sometimes in meeting an utter stranger I found a little 
difficulty ; not that it was difficult for me to understand him, for he 
spoke very much like all the others that I had dealt with, but he at 
first would have some difficulty in adjusting himself to the sort of 
language spoken by myself and my companions. _ 

By August the caribou skins were suitable for clothing. Up to [ 
that time we had killed only for food and had eaten each animal 
before moving to where the next was killed, so that our baggage had 
not increased ; but now we had to begin saving the skins against the 
winter, and by the latter part of August we had a bundle of some- 
thing like forty of the soft, short-haired pelts, so that our movements 
began to be hampered by the bulk and weight of our back-loads. 
We therefore chose a large dead spruce, the trunk of which was free 
of bark and limbs, and fifteen feet up it we suspended our bundle of 
skins. This we did for fear of the wolverines, for the Indians say 
that the wolverine cannot climb a smooth tree-trunk if the tree be so 
stout that it is unable to reach half around it with its legs in trying to 
climb. In this I have not much faith, because I have seen so many 
caches made which the Indians and Eskimo say are perfectly safe, 
and later when the cache is found to be rifled, the natives are inva- 

221 



222 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

riably astounded and assure you that they never heard of such a 
thing before. We tied our bundle with thongs to the trunk of the 
tree, and three weeks later when we came back it turned out that the 
first wolverine had just that day climbed up and eaten some of the 
thongs. Apparently it was mere accident that protected our clothing 
materials, and had we come a day later we might have found the skins 
destroyed. 

f The summer had been one of continuous sunshine, but that changed 
with the month of September, and the mists and fogs were then almost 
as continuous as the sunshine had been. The rutting season had 
commenced, and the bull caribou, which were numerous in summer in 
all the wood fringe northeast of Bear Lake, had moved out in the 
open country, and the hunting had become more difficult. Finally, 
by the end of September the caribou had become very few in 
number. 

The Eskimo had all summer been making sledges, wooden snow- 
shovels, bows and spear handles, and other articles of wood. All 
these things and a good supply of caribou meat were stored at a spot 
which we called the "sled-making place," but which the Slaveys of 
Bear Lake, who know the country well and visit it in winter, call 
"Big Stick Island." This is a clump of large spruce trees on the 
southeast branch of the Dease River. The Eskimo were now waiting 
for the first snow of the year so they could hitch their dogs to the sleds 
they had made, load their provisions upon them, and move north 
toward the coast where they expected to spend the winter in sealing. 
But starvation began to threaten, so that finally, on September 25, 
the last party started toward the coast, carrying their sleds on their 
backs, for the first snow had not yet fallen. 

I wanted very much to accompany them, to become as familiar 
with their winter life as I already was with their summer habits, but 
it did not seem a safe thing to try, for their only source of food in 
winter is the seal, and these must be hunted, under the peculiar 
Coronation Gulf conditions, by methods unfamiliar to my companions 
and myself. Of course, we could have learned their hunting methods 
readily enough, but they told us that almost every winter, in spite 
of the most assiduous care in hunting, they are reduced to the verge 
of starvation. Frequently (and it turned out to be so that winter) 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 223 

they have to eat the caribou sinew they have saved up to use as 
sewing-thread, the skins they have intended for clotliing, and often 
their clothing, too, while about one year in three some of their dogs 
die of hunger ; a few years ago about half of one of the larger tribes 
starved to death. It was both fear of actual want and fear that if 
want came their superstition would blame us for it that kept us from 
going to the sea-coast with them. We decided, therefore, to winter 
on the head-waters of the Dease River, where the woodland throws 
an arm far out into the Barren Ground ; to try to lay up there suffi- 
cient stores of food for the winter ; to pass there the period of the 
absence of the sun ; and to join the Coronation Gulf Eskimo in 
March, when abundance of hunting-light would make it safer to 
go into a country poorly stocked with game. 

When we had decided upon this, I left my Eskimo to build a 
winter hut, while I walked alone down to the mouth of the Dease 
River, a distance of about thirty miles, to where my friends Melvill 
and Hornby were going to have their winter camp. I found there 
also Mr. Joseph Hodgson with his family, consisting of his wife, son, 
daughter, and nephew. Mr. Hodgson is a retired officer of the Hud- 
son's Bay Company, who, through the many years of his service on the 
Mackenzie River, had had a longing to get out of the beaten track of 
the fur-trader. For many years, he told me, it had been his special 
dream to spend the winter on the Dease River, and he had now come 
to do it. The mouth of the Dease is a picturesque spot, and although 
the Indians told Mr. Hodgson that it was "no good" as a fishing place 
or as a location for hunting or trapping, he nevertheless stuck to his 
original intention and built his house there. 

Both Mr. Hodgson and the Englishmen who lived about three 
miles away from him had a small store of white men's food, such as 
flour, sugar, tea, salt, and the like. But these were articles we did 
completely without, and even to the others they were merely luxuries, 
for they had to get the main part of their food-supply from the caribou 
of the land and the trout of Bear Lake. In spite of the little they 
had they offered me a share, a thing that I much appreciated, both 
because it shows the spirit of the North and because my Eskimo were 
immeasurably gladdened by a little flour, a thing they had not ex- 
pected and without which they can get along very well, but the 



224 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

possession of which they feel marks them off definitely from the poor 
trash who cannot afford such things. 

Melvill and Hornby had built their house on Bear Lake itself, 
about half a mile east of the old site of Fort Confidence, which had 
been built by Dease and Simpson in the thirties, and occupied again 
by Richardson and Rae in the forties of the last century. The fort 
was a group of log buildings, which stood until a few years ago, when 
some Indians set fire to them, and now only the huge stone chimneys 
are standing, like the monoliths of Salisbury Plain, monuments of a 
bygone time. 

The firewood chopped by Richardson's men, and piled up method- 
ically after the nature of Englishmen, looked as if it had been chopped 
last year — a striking proof of the fact that in the northern regions 
decay is very slow. Some months before on the Arctic coast west of 
Cape Bexley I had seen wood that had been chopped with sharp axes. 
Now we knew that no one with a sharp axe had been there since 
Richardson in 1848, and yet these chips looked nearly fresh. The 
weathering of wood seems greater in one season in the latitude of 45° 
north than in twenty years in the latitude of 70°. 

I spent two weeks with my friends on Bear Lake, writing letters 
which it was expected some Slavey Indians would take to Fort Nor- 
man at Christmas-time. In ordinary years no Indians winter on the 
east end of Bear Lake, but this time a few families were there, at- 
tracted by the presence of the white men ; and they would, of course, 
being good Catholics, have to go to Fort Norman to celebrate Christ- 
mas as well as to trade with the Hudson's Bay Company and with 
the "Free Traders." These two weeks passed very pleasantly for 
me, yet in a way I regretted them, for I missed seeing the one big 
herd of caribou that came into our territory in the year. I have 
often seen five hundred caribou in a band, and sometimes a thousand, 
but the herd that crossed the eastern head waters of Dease River, 
going south from the 10th to the 14th of October, certainly numbered 
a great many hundreds of thousands, and probably millions. 

The two Eskimo had gone off on what they intended as a day's 
prospecting trip to the eastward from our camp in search of a fishing- 
lake. They took with them their rifles, of course ; but, not having 
seen any caribou the last few days, they had now, as they had done 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 225 

the previous spring, made up their minds that no caribou were coming 
into our country any more, and they had therefore taken with them 
only about twenty cartridges, saying as they started that they felt 
sure they would catch enough fish so that they would not have to 
shoot ptarmigan. When they got down to the fishing-lake, they saw, 
to their surprise, a few caribou near its eastern end. The wind was 
blowing from the north, and when they were approaching these cari- 
bou, they noticed a strange stench which they hardly knew how to 
interpret. The big herd must have been a few miles to the north, 
and they had smelled it as one might smell a barnyard on close 
approach. 

That day they wasted most of the cartridges on the few caribou in 
sight, skinned half a dozen or so, and camped overnight. When the 
big herd came the next morning, they were nearly without cartridges. 
They were awakened by the tramp of caribou marching past in solid 
columns, two, three, or more abreast, and the columns anywhere 
from a few yards to a quarter of a mile apart. Sometimes the herd 
walked, but generally they proceeded on a trot. Such a sight as this 
had never been seen by my Eskimo, and it dumfounded them. 
Natkusiak, who always did the thinking for the two of them, decided 
immediately that he would, with the few cartridges they had, sit 
down and try to shoot two or three caribou with each bullet, while 
Tannaumirk was to go back the short eight miles to our camp to get 
ammunition. 

Tannaumirk accordingly started, but when he got a mile or so 
on his way, he saw a place where the caribou were crossing the frozen 
river, coming down a steep cut-bank. As they did so it occurred to 
him that if he were to hide under the cut-bank, he would he able to 
stab the caribou as they passed. The animals were too quick for 
him, however; and although, according to his own story, he was 
several times able to touch them with the point of his knife, he was 
unable to kill any. He then went and cut down a stout willow and 
made a long spear-handle for his knife. He is very sure that had he 
done this in the first place he would have killed a good many caribou, 
but when he took up his position afresh under the cut-bank, the caribou 
had ceased coming over that spot. Nevertheless, he spent the entire 
day skulking under other cut-banks, trying to stab caribou as they 



226 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

passed. Finally, when he was pretty well tired out, there was only 
daylight enough left for him to reach home. 

The next morning when he was about to return to Natkusiak 
with the ammunition, he saw a band of bull caribou near the camp. 
Of course, no one with brains would have done such a thing as he had 
done the day before, nor would any one have stayed to follow three or 
four bulls when he knew that the march of the big herd was in progress 
to the east ; but Tannaumirk was never very bright, and he spent the 
entire day in stalking and shooting three bulls. While he was 
skinning them, he happened to see some wolves, and made up his 
mind that it was important that he carry the meat home to camp. 
This took him several hours of the third day, and it was nearly eve- 
ning on that day when he finally got back to Natkusiak with the 
cartridges. 

Meantime Natkusiak had used his four or five bullets so well that 
he averaged killing two deer with each one, but when Tannaumirk 
got back, the herd had passed and only a few stragglers remained. 
For two days the herd had been moving south, past the west end of 
our fishing-lake, and when I came home a few days later, I found a belt 
of country several miles in breadth so trampled down by the feet of 
the caribou that it might be spoken of as one continuous trail. Had 
I been there myself, I don't think there would have been any possi- 
bility of making even an approximate count of the herd. As it was, 
I merely agree with the Eskimo that the numbers were beyond 
comprehension. We got only twenty-nine animals out of it, however, 
while with any management at all we should have been able to kill at 
one spot enough meat to last us the whole winter. 

It will be remembered that I had left Dr. Anderson and some of 
our Eskimo behind at Langton Bay, and it seemed to me wise now to 
try to connect with him, because I knew he would already be worry- 
ing about what had happened to us. His Eskimo, I felt sure, would 
take it for granted that we were long since dead, and I thought it 
likely — as, indeed, was the case — that Dr. Anderson would have 
in mind starting a search expedition for us. It seemed evidently 
much easier for us to find him (for we knew where he was) than for 
him to find us. Besides, the largest unexplored area on the continent 
lay between us on Bear Lake and his location on Franklin Bay, and 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 227 

this I was anxious to explore. The previous winter had been spent 
by us on the lower reaches of Horton River. When Richardson first 
saw the mouth of Horton River in 1826, he gave it a name ; he also 
gave names in that immediate neighborhood to two other rivers, — 
Ellice and Jardine, — and the charts in no way indicate that one of 
these is larger than the other. The mouths of all are set down, but 
nothing else is shown. Now we found in the winter of 1909-1910 that 
the rivers Ellice and Jardine were creeks that you could jump across 
and not over six miles in length, while we had that same year 
explored some two hundred and fifty miles of the lower reaches of 
Horton River, and we had found it to have all the earmarks of a big 
river. It seemed as wide at two hundred and fifty miles upstream 
as it was twenty-five miles from the sea, and it came from the direc- 
tion of Bear Lake. 

Now that we were on Bear Lake, I thought that by taking a 
course northwest true from the northeast corner of the lake for Lang- 
ton Bay I should not only reach Langton Bay, but, incidentally, 
should probably find and be able to chart the upper reaches of Horton 
River. On this journey Natkusiak would of course go with me, while 
Tannaumirk and Pannigabluk remained behind on Dease River at 
our winter camp; but it seemed advisable to get also a Slavey 
Indian companion, for the Slaveys claim to know the country far 
to the north of Bear Lake, and one man in particular, known as 
Johnny Sanderson, said he knew all about it for a distance of several 
days' travel. Besides, we had no toboggans of our own, and our 
runner-sled was unsuitable on the tundra, so I hired Johnny with 
two toboggans and one dog-team. 

On November 8, 1910, we started from the mouth of Dease River j 
on our journey toward Franklin Bay ; for two or three days before 
that we had been engaged in putting the finishing touches on our 
equipment, which meant making dog-harness and packing up dry 
caribou meat. Both at this time and on the two or three other 
occasions when we had come to Dease River Mr. Hodgson enter- 
tained us hospitably and helped us in every way. For the first forty 
miles after leaving his house we followed the shore of Bear Lake north- 
westward, and then struck inland, traveling west by compass, which 
here means northwest true. We had only about six days' provisions 



228 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

with us, for among other things Johnny had told us that there would 
be plenty of caribou as soon as we got away from the fringe of woods 
about Bear Lake. I have often started upon a longer trip than the 
three weeks we anticipated for this one, with less than six days' pro- 
visions, but in this case we could easily have taken more, for Mr. 
Hodgson generously offered to supply us with as much as we wanted 
to haul. Johnny regarded himself, apparently, as quite infallible, 
and succeeded in impressing me with the probability that he was 
nearly so ; but few men I have dealt with have panned out so poorly 
as Johnny Sanderson. 

Going in a northwesterly direction, it takes about forty miles of 
traveling to reach the edge of the Barren Ground, and for all this 
distance we saw plenty of caribou tracks, but Johnny told us it would 
not be worth while following them and delaying our journey by a 
hunt in the woods, because, he said, "the Indians call the treeless 
country the Caribou Ground, and that is because it is always covered 
with caribou." A few miles after we had left the trees behind us 
and entered upon what we called the Barren Ground (but what 
Johnny called the Caribou Ground) we crossed the tracks of half a 
dozen or so animals, and after that for two hundred miles we never 
saw another track. 

Johnny was proud of his varied experiences as a traveler, and told 
how this and that great man of the Hudson's Bay Company had em- 
ployed him as head guide, and how they always placed implicit re- 
liance in him. He said there were few places he did not know, and 
that even where he was a stranger his judgment was so good that he 
was seldom at fault. 

This confidence in himself had been so often justified in the past 
that the fact of its being seldom justified on the present trip evidently 
seemed to him an exception scarcely worthy of note. We struck the 
Barren Ground on the morning of our fourth day, and toward eve- 
ning we had a blizzard. When it came time to camp, we searched for a 
small lake, because the ice at this season was not much more than a 
foot thick and fuel was scarce, so we wanted to get water for cook- 
ing. When we got to the shore of a small pond, I stopped the sled. 
The selection did not suit Johnny, however ; he said that no one who 
knew anything about traveling would ever pick such a place for a 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 229 

camp. Half a mile back, he said, he had seen a cut-bank under the 
shelter of which we could have pitched our tent, and even now he 
could see, only a little way ahead of us, a round hill with a steep slope 
to leeward that would be a fine place under which to camp, for the 
hill would break the wind. 

Now my idea and Natkusiak's did not coincide with Johnny's, 
because to us it was clear that if we camped in the lee of an obstruc- 
tion the drifting snow would in the night cover up our tent and place 
us in danger of being smothered even were the tent not to cave in 
with the weight of the snow. No man of any winter experience in 
the open will pitch his tent in a shelter where there is the possibility 
of a blizzard. Johnny's ideas were all gained in the forested country, 
where it is wise, of course, to choose the most sheltered spots, and it 
seemed to him that we were little better than insane. He announced, 
therefore, that he would take the matter into his own hands and 
pitch the camp in the shelter of the hill, and he told me incidentally 
that I was the first white man he had ever seen who did not know 
enough to understand that an Indian knows more than a white man 
about how to make camp. Of course, the obvious answer was that 
now that he had the opportunity he had better watch carefully people 
who had different ideas from his and see what the result would be. 

Natkusiak and I had to take Johnny's own sled away from him 
by a show of force, and had the pleasure of listening to his comments 
while we, without any help from him, put up the tent. During that 
time, and at various other times thereafter, Johnny told us much of a 
party of the Geological Survey of Canada which had been com- 
manded by a white man who was my superior in every way, and who, 
while he was inexperienced, had the good sense to defer to Johnny in 
everything. Among other things Johnny had said that we would all 
probably freeze to death during the night, but we banked up the tent 
so well, Eskimo fashion, that we had not been inside of it more than an 
hour or so before Johnny began to complain that it was too warm, and 
that he was getting wet, through the snow in his clothes melting and 
soaking in. He had been so sure that the tent was going to be so cold 
— nothing could melt in it — that he had not thought it worth while 
to brush the snow off his fur coat. 

We made no fire, for Natkusiak and I agreed that digging heather 



230 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

for fuel from underneath the snow was not worth the bother; we 
ate frozen raw caribou meat and drank cold water, at all of which 
Johnny complained bitterly. We could, he pointed out, have used 
the ordinary forethought of sane men ; we could have hauled a load 
of dry spruce wood from the Bear Lake woods and could have made 
ourselves comfortable with a fire and a warm meal. To this we 
answered that our dogs agreed with us in considering the sleds heavy 
enough without piling a cord of wood on top of them, and that there 
was no need for special effort toward making us comfortable, for we 
were comfortable already. 

The next morning we started early. Fortunately for us, the 
blizzard was from the southeast, and, although it was still blowing a 
little, it only helped us on. But with the southeast wind in this dis- 
trict there usually comes a fog, and so it was now. We got into some 
very hilly country — mountainous it seemed — and although we 
made a long day, we had to camp without finding any trees or sign 
of a river. I was expecting to find Horton River about here, and 
hoping that if we found it we should find spruce, or at least willows, 
in the valley bottom. It turned out that on our second Barren 
Ground day we camped just a little too soon, for the next morning 
early we struck a river about one hundred yards wide coming in from 
the east and flowing sluggishly through level country with scarcely 
the vestige of a valley. We followed it west about six miles ; then 
the conformation of the country began to indicate that the stream 
probably made a large curve, first southwest, and later west, north, 
and a little back again east. Anyway, our destination was Franklin 
Bay, which lay northwest true, so we abandoned the stream and 
struck northwest again about eighteen miles. Here we came upon 
the river again, and found it, much to our satisfaction, to be fairly 
well timbered with black spruce, while at the point where we struck 
it in the morning there had been nothing but willows. 

From this point on for six days we followed the winding course of 
the stream. There were rapids here and there and stretches of open 
water, but we always found a thoroughfare past these difficulties 
along one bank or the other. In some places the valley is fairly wide ; 
in others the river plunges through narrow limestone canons, and 
everywhere it is crooked, but when you once commit yourself to the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 231 

river, you must follow it, for the country through which it runs is, 
much of it, hills of soHd rock, the tops of which are swept clean of 
snow by the fierce winter winds, and across them there is consequently 
no practicable road. Sleds such as we had would be worn out on the 
rocky surface in half a day, and even steel-shod sleds could not last 
more than a day or so. One must consequently follow the ice of 
some river. 

Compared with many of our other trips, this one looks easy on the 
map, but it was really the most difficult we ever made. We had ex- 
pected to find plenty of game, and found none at all, not even ptar- 
migan. After leaving the woods of Bear Lake we had begun to save 
our food ; when we entered the river we had already eaten up all the 
meat which we took along from Bear Lake, but Melvill and Hornby 
had given me ten pounds of flour, and Mr. Hodgson some caribou 
tallow. We used these for making soup, our ration being four table- 
spoonfuls of flour and an eighth of a pound of tallow per man per day. 
We gave each of our dogs about as much tallow as we took ourselves, 
and divided up among them some long-haired caribou skins to give 
them something of bulk in their stomachs. It is our practice to feed 
the dogs as long as we do ourselves, for the speed of the party depends' 
upon the strength of the dogs, and it would be bad generalship to 
hoard food to the disadvantage of the dog-team when speed is the 
one thing to be desired ; besides, the dogs deserve this for the faithful 
service of many years. 

It was on the morning of the seventh day on the river that we 
saw some caribou tracks. My Eskimo got along with Johnny 
Sanderson even worse than I did myself, and while under ordinary 
circiunstances I did the hunting, in this case I let my Eskimo follow 
the caribou tracks and went ahead with Johnny and the two sleds 
down the river. We made a fair day, but in the evening Natkusiak 
came home empty-handed. He had seen plenty of tracks, but no 
caribou. Up to this time I had been uncertain whether the river we 
were on was really Horton River and whether it would lead us even- 
tually to Franklin Bay, where we had some reason to think that Dr. 
Anderson would be waiting for us in a camp which we hoped would 
turn out well stocked with deer-meat. During this last day, however, 
the character of the river had changed so much and had become so 



232 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

familiar to me that I felt sure it could not be long until I should finally 
recognize the most southerly spot reached by us the previous winter. 
Natkusiak had not been with me on my longest southeasterly jour- 
ney the year before, so that the following day I let him and the 
Indian proceed with the sleds and hunted myself, with the idea that 
I should probably find myself on familiar ground. This turned out 
to be true. We were now in the district in which we had found 
caribou fairly abundant just a year before, and, as good luck would 
have it, they were fairly abundant still. I saw several bands and 
shot two animals before mid-afternoon. Hard times were therefore 
over, for I knew that it would take no more than three or four days 
more to reach the coast. Both ourselves and our dogs had lost a 
little flesh, and poor Johnny had, before we reached this district of 
plenty, wasted considerable time bewailing the evil day upon which 
he had joined such an expedition as ours. 

The traveler's best motto is, " It is better to be safe than sorry." 
Acting on this principle, I decided to camp right where we were for 
a few days, to hunt caribou, since we had found them, and to dry the 
meat. We feared we possibly might not, after all, find Dr. Anderson 
on Franklin Bay, for not only is human life proverbially uncertain, 
but Anderson had gone on so long a journey to the west the previous 
summer that I was not sure that he would have been able to return ; 
and even had he returned, I was not sure how successful his autumn 
hunt had been, and had no guarantee that we should find his camp 
well stocked with food. We did not have very good luck with the 
hunting. Johnny hunted one day, with no success at all, and Nat- 
kusiak and I between us killed seven. After half drying the meat 
over a camp-fire we cached it for our return journey and proceeded 
north. Everything was famihar now, for this was the district in 
which we had hunted a good deal and starved a little the year before. 
I took a six-mile walk one day to revisit our camp of the year before, 
and in the half-darkness of the winter noon I sat awhile looking at 
the ruins of what had been a comfortable shelter from many a storm. 
I had advised Dr. Anderson to make his winter camp here this year, 
too, but to my disappointment I found no sign of him. 

When we reached the point directly south of Langton Bay, which 
is the southeast corner of Franklin Bay, we struck overland a dis- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 233 

tance of about fifteen miles. The country here is a high plateau 
from which there is a steep descent of about two thousand feet when 
one comes within about three miles of the ocean. ' As we approached 
this descent we walked into a terrific local gale blowing off the plateau. 
These local gales on Franklin Bay are a regular feature of the early 
winter months. The explanation seems to be that the ocean outside 
is free of ice and the air over it is therefore warm, while the high 
plateau inland is intensely cold. The heavy cold air of the plateau 
therefore rushes down like an invisible Niagara, pouring down into 
the vacuum caused by the upward currents of air over the sea. 
We reached the coast two miles west of the Langton Bay harbor, 
where our scientific collections of the two previous years were stored, 
and where I knew I should find some message from Anderson if he 
were not there himself. It was a time of considerable suspense, for 
the trip from Bear Lake had been so difficult that none of us liked 
the idea of returning at once without a little chance to rest ; and this 
we knew we should have to do if Dr. Anderson proved to be absent, 
for at this time of the year Langton Bay is devoid of game, and any 
one living there must depend on stores gathered the previous summer. 

Before quite reaching Langton Bay harbor, however, we came 
upon sled tracks, and at the harbor itself we found Dr. Anderson and 
our Eskimo safe, comfortably housed and fairly well supplied with 
food. The main part of the food was whale, the carcass of which 
had drifted in to the beach just before the freeze-up in the fall. 
This animal had been freshly killed when he drifted ashore, and 
furnished us, therefore, a supply of food which was not only abundant 
but also palatable. I found here waiting for me some mail, to get 
which Dr. Anderson had had to make a thousand-mile trip the pre- 
vious summer west to the whaling-station at Herschel Island. My 
most recent letter had been written on the 13th of May, 1910, and it 
was now the 4th of December. 

After resting about two weeks we started back toward Bear 
Lake, leaving the same four Eskimo behind, although Dr. Anderson 
accompanied us. Knowing the character of the country, and having 
plenty of food at Langton Bay, we loaded the sleds with provisions, 
which, together with the caribou meat we had cached inland, would 
be equal to about twenty-five days' full rations. Had everything 



234 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

on the homeward road been as it was on the northwestward journey, 
this would have been ample, for we had come from Bear Lake to 
the sea in twenty-six days, but we were now a month later in the 
season ; the sun had long ago gone away and we had only twilight at 
noon, and the snow lay thick and soft in many places in the river where 
on the way north there was glare ice. Our progress southward was 
therefore very slow, and by the time we reached that point of Horton 
River where one begins the portage to Bear Lake we were on short 
rations again. In our two days' crossing of the Barren Ground we 
again had a blizzard, but again it happened to be blowing at our 
backs and rather helped than hindered us, although we could see 
practically nothing of the country through which we traveled. 

On our second day in the Barren Ground we had the last and 
most striking proof of Johnny's infallibility. We had come to per- 
haps a dozen trees, and I said to Johnny, " Well, this is fine ; now we 
are back in your Bear Lake woods again." No, that was not so, he 
said. There were two ranges of hills on the Barren Ground. One 
of these was right in the middle of the Barren Ground, and on the 
southerly slope of this range were a few trees. It was at these trees 
we now were, and if we left them, it would take us another whole day 
of travel before we came to the next. He told us, therefore, that 
unless we wanted to camp without firewood we must camp here. Dr. 
Anderson and I talked this over, and we agreed that Johnny had 
never in the past proved right in anything ; but still it seemed better 
to do as he advised, for, after all, this was his own country, and he 
ought to know something about it. The blizzard was still blowing, 
and it was intensely cold. If we had pitched camp where there were 
no trees we should have made a small tent, Eskimo fashion, and it 
would have taken us only a few moments to do so ; but now that we 
had trees we put up an Indian-style tepee, a difficult thing to do in a 
storm, and a matter of two hours or so of hard work during which 
all of us froze our faces several times and suffered other minor in- 
conveniences. My idea had been, on seeing these few trees, that 
we were now on the edge of the forest, and that a few miles more of 
travel would bring ub into the thick of woods where no wind can stir 
the snow ; and in the morning when we awoke and looked out, sure 
enough, there was the edge of the forest only a few hundred yards 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 235 

away, with the woods stretching black and unbroken toward Bear 
Lake. But for the wisdom of Johnny Sanderson we might have 
camped in its shelter and escaped one of the most disagreeable camp- 
making experiences we ever had. 

The next day we had traveled only a few miles before we came 
upon the tracks of caribou. Our thermometer had broken some 
time before, and so I speak without the book, but there is little 
doubt that the temperature was considerably below 50° Fahrenheit. 
There was not a breath of air stirring. While the other three pro- 
ceeded with the sled I struck out to one side to look for caribou. 
First I saw a band that had been frightened by our main party. 
There were only a few clearings in the woods, but wherever the ani- 
mals were you could discover their presence by the clouds of steam 
that rose from them high above the tops of the trees. 

There are few things one sees in the North so nearly beyond belief 
as certain of the phenomena of intense cold as I saw and heard them 
that day. It turned out that the woods were full of caribou, and 
wherever a band was running you could not only see the steam rising 
from it and revealing its presence, even on the other side of a fairly 
high hill, but, more remarkable still, the air was so calm that where 
an animal ran past rapidly he left behind him a cloud of steam hover- 
ing over his trail and marking it out plainly for a mile behind him. 
When you stopped to listen, you could hear the tramp of marching 
caribou all around you. On such days as this I have watched caribou 
bands a full mile away whose walking I could hear distinctly although 
there was no crust on the snow ; and as for them, they could not only 
hear me walking, but could even tell the difference in the sounds of 
my footsteps from those of the hundreds of caribou that were walking 
about at the same time. 

My first opportunity to shoot came through my hearing the ap- 
proach of a small band. I stopped still and waited for them. I was 
not nervous, but rather absent-minded. In other words, my mind 
was more fully occupied than it should have been with the importance 
of getting those particular caribou. I always carry the magazine 
of my rifle full but the chamber empty, and as the animals approached 
I drew back the bolt to throw a cartridge into the chamber, but when 
I tried to shove the bolt forward it stuck fast. This is the only time 



236 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

in four years of hard usage that anything has interfered with the 
perfect working of my Mannhcher-Schoenauer. The caribou were 
moving past without seeing me, and I became a bit excited. I knew 
the rifle was strong, and I hammered on the end of the bolt with the 
palm of my hand, but it would not move. When the caribou were 
finally out of range and when nothing more could be done, I for the 
first time took a good look at the rifle to try to discover the trouble, and 
saw that one side of the bolt had something frozen fast to it. It 
turned out that when I had drawn the bolt back to load the rifle I 
had carelessly allowed the palm of my bare hand to rest against the 
bolt, and a piece of skin about an inch long and a quarter of an inch 
wide had frozen fast to the bolt and been torn away from my hand 
without my noticing it. It took but a few moments scraping with my 
hunting knife to remove the blood from the bolt, and the rifle was in 
good working order again. 

Three days later we reached the house of Melvill and Hornby on 
Bear Lake, thirty-three days after leaving Langton Bay. After a 
short visit with them and Mr. Hodgson we proceeded up the Dease 
River and found Tannaumirk and Pannigabluk well, although getting 
short of food, for Tannaumirk was not a hunter of much enterprise. 

No caribou were just then to be found near our winter quarters, so 
Dr. Anderson, one of the Eskimo, and myself struck out south to 
look for them. On the second day we found them near the northeast 
corner of Bear Lake, but had hard luck that day on account of variable 
faint airs that continually gave the animals our wind. The next day, 
however, we got sixteen, and within the next twenty days thereafter 
fifty-two more, which was plenty of meat for the rest of the winter. 



CHAPTER XV 

ON March 22, 1911, we started for Coronation Gulf, leaving 
Pannigabluk behind to look after our house, to prepare dried 
meat for the contemplated overland journey to Langton Bay, 
and to protect everything against thefts from wolves and wolverines. 
We had two toboggans and nine dogs, and carried with us about four 
days' provisions of meat, besides a few trade articles, some of which 
we had brought with us overland in the winter from Langton Bay and 
some of which we had secured from Melvill and Hornby and from 
Hodgson. These consisted chiefly of butcher knives, needles, and 
empty tin cans. The tin cans, although of little value to us, were 
of inestimable value to the Eskimo. One tin such as we throw away, 
after emptying it of its contents of baking powder or salmon, will 
last a thrifty Eskimo housewife several years as a cooking pot for 
boiling small things over a seal-oil lamp. I remember one trade we 
made where we gave some carpenter tools, worth about three dollars, 
for a bow and quiver of arrows. The man later, with our permis- 
sion, returned the carpenter tools and took in their stead a cubical 
tin which had at one time held about five pounds of Melvill and 
Hornby's dried onions. 

On the northward journey we broke new ground, partly because 
we wanted to see the country farther west than we had seen it before, 
but also because we thought that by going straight north from our 
camp we would probably strike the west end of Dismal Lake. We 
wanted not only to see the lake but also to use the thirty-six smooth 
miles of its ice-covered length, because by doing so we were sure of just 
that much easy going. 

The road north from our camp led us through granitic hills with 
plenty of tree growth on them and caribou tracks here and there, 
showing that we need have no fear for the securing of food. However, 
we saw no animals for the first two days, and on the third day, exactly 
as I had hoped, we came in sight of Dismal Lake. 

237 



238 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

The lake itself in its western part is devoid of tree growth, except 
that the river which flows into its extreme end is thickly timbered 
and sends out a fringe of trees along the lake shore for a little way on 
each side of the mouth. From there east for thirty miles there is 
nothing for fuel except some small clumps of willows, the tallest 
of which will not be over four feet in height. The lake has a width 
of from a mile to six miles or so, until about eight miles from the 
eastern end, where it narrows down to a width of ninety to two hun- 
dred yards for a space of about a mile. East of that it widens again 
and along the northern shore spruce begin to appear. These change 
to an abundant growth at the outlet of the lake, and Kendall River, 
which drains the lake southeast into the Coppermine, may be con- 
sidered thickly forested. 

When about four miles from the eastern end of the lake we left 
it, striking off on the north side to make a short cut along the southern 
side of some steep hills which run east towards the Coppermine. 
We were traveling now on high ground and could see south across 
the valley of the Kendall bands of caribou grazing about six miles 
away. We accordingly camped, for our meat had about run out and 
it seemed well to replenish our stores. 

I happened at this juncture to be suffering from a chafed foot 
on account of having worn a badly made stocking the day we left 
home. Dr. Anderson and Natkusiak therefore undertook to hunt, 
and I stayed at home to give my foot a chance to recover. Tannau- 
mirk, who was a fair seamstress, also stayed at home mending boots 
and stockings and incidentally telling me folk-lore stories which I 
wrote down in the original language as he told them. Tannaumirk 
could never be relied upon for an enterprise of moment, but he had 
many good qualities, among which were an unvarying cheerfulness 
and an inexhaustible fund of folk-lore tales, songs, and charms, which 
he had at first, like the rest of his countrymen, been loath to repeat 
to me on account of being used to having white men make game of 
him for doing so. But now that he had found that I had a real in- 
terest in such things he never tired of telling them. 

In the evening when our hunters came home they reported having 
seen caribou in great numbers, but they had not had the best of 
luck. Dr. Anderson had shot two and Natkusiak had failed to get 




Rough Ice on Coppermine. 





^ / 






[^ 







Eskimo wearing Snow Goggles. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 239 

any. It had been a bright sunshiny day and Dr. Anderson had care- 
lessly gone without glasses, with the result that he was slightly snow- 
blind the following morning. 

Seeing that the subject has been mentioned, it may be worth 
while to say that we have tried glasses of all colors and makes and 
have found the amber ones, made on the same principle as light 
filters for cameras, to be far superior to blue, green, plain smoked, 
or any other variety. The Eskimo goggles, which are made of pieces 
of wood with two narrow slits for the eyes, each about large enough 
for a half-dollar to be slipped through it, are satisfactory in that they 
do not cloud over and that they protect the eyes from snow-blind- 
ness ; but the difficulty with them is that the range of vision is so 
restricted that it is as if you were looking out through a pair of key- 
holes in a door. This is especially troublesome on rough ice or un- 
even ground, where you keep stubbing your toe against every ob- 
stacle, for through the narrow slits you can see what is in front of 
your feet only by looking directly down. 

As my chafed foot was not completely recovered yet, and as Dr. 
Anderson was snow-blind, it fell to Natkusiak and Tannaumirk to 
go for the meat of the caribou Dr. Anderson had shot. It was an- 
other cold, clear day as it had been the day before, and it furnished 
us with yet another example of the fact that Eskimo do not have com- 
passes in their heads, for although the caribou had been killed and 
cached only about seven miles away from camp, Natkusiak was un- 
able to find them in an all-day search and the two of them returned 
home after dark with an empty sled. This meant loss of valuable 
time, and worst of all, the consumption by us and our dogs of the 
few remaining pounds of dried meat we had brought with us from 
home. It is of course always wise to eat your green meat first and 
keep the light and condensed dried meat to the last. 

The place where the two deer were cached was plainly visible 
with the glasses from our camp, so that it seemed likely that the next 
day Natkusiak and Tannaumirk would be able to find it, which it 
turned out that they did. We had delayed so long now, however, 
that two caribou were hardly sufficient meat to go on with, so that I 
went across the Horton River a mile or two east of where the Eskimo 
went to get the cached meat, and shot three caribou and a fine speci- 



240 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

men of white wolf. This wolf was not only fat and excellent eating, 
but its skin was of great value, either scientifically or commercially ; 
— scientifically because the animal is rare, and commercially because 
the Eskimo of the Mackenzie district and therefore the members of 
our own party value the skin highly as trimming for their winter coats. 
A wolfskin of the type which the Eskimo most admire can, when 
cut into strips, be sold for as much as twelve foxskins, which being 
translated into dollars at the prices quoted in 1912 would mean from 
one hundred to one hundred and twenty dollars for each wolfskin. 

Natkusiak and Tannaumirk heard my shooting when I bagged 
the three caribou, and after discovering the cached meat they came 
over and helped me skin, and took on their sled some of the meat. 
The next day we spent in hauling the rest of the meat to camp and 
in making a platform cache upon which to leave behind what we 
could not take with us. Besides meat, we left also in this cache the 
valuable wolfskin and the skins of two caribou which we intended 
for scientific specimens. We knew very well that this cache would 
not be safe from wolverines, but counted on the rarity of those 
animals in these parts for a chance to get back before everything 
had been destroyed. The wolves and foxes, we knew, would be 
unable to steal from a seven-foot high platform. 

We reached the Coppermine March 30th, five or six miles north of 
the mouth of the Kendall, and followed it thence north beyond Bloody 
Fall, or within about four miles of the coast. The Coppermine was 
this winter, and probably is all winters, a rough route to travel. 
In summer it is a continuous rapid and in winter it gives you in places 
the impression of medium bad pressure ice at sea. What apparently 
happens is this : the river freezes over in the fall while the water 
still stands at a fairly high level, and the ice gets anywhere from a few 
inches to a foot in thickness. The water in the river then begins to 
settle lower and lower and an air space is left between the ice and the 
running water. Eventually the thin ice roof breaks down with a 
crash into the open water, and for a little way the big cakes of ice 
are carried down-stream by the strong current until they are finally 
jammed in a heap to freeze fast a second time. 

Although in summer the Coppermine carries a considerable vol- 
ume of water, it flows through a narrow valley and is itself a narrow 




Traveling on the Coppermine River in Spring. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 241 

stream. About fifteen miles north of tlie moutli of the Kendall I 
measured it in several places, finding it about 135 yards in one spot, 
130 in another, 125 in a third, and 230 yards in the widest place seen 
that day, which meant the widest place in a stretch of fifteen miles. 
A few days before I had measured the width of the Kendall River 
in two places at 92 and 135 yards respectively. Of course that does 
not mean that the Kendall is nearly so large a stream as the Copper- 
mine. It is in fact a river across which a man can wade in many 
places in summer, whereas the Coppermine is everywhere deep, 
although its channel is so tortuous, its bed so full of rocks, and its 
current so swift that it can never become a river for steamboat 
navigation, although it may sometime furnish almost unlimited power 
if its rapids and falls are ever harnessed for commercial purposes. 

Traveling northward along the bed of the Coppermine, we 
naturally had no opportunities of seeing caribou, for there are 
no feeding grounds within sight from the river ice and we knew from 
experience that their habits did not lead them to cross the river, 
even when they fed in considerable numbers along its very banks. 
April 1st our supply of meat had again begun to run low, so instead 
of following the river bed we ascended the hill on the east side and 
traveled north parallel to the river, a mile or two away from it. 
After half a day of this sort of travel we came upon some level land 
which had the summer before, when we were there, been entirely 
devoid of game, but which was now fairly covered with tracks of 
caribou, and soon we came upon the caribou themselves grazing in 
hundreds. Natkusiak went after them, got within range, and fired, 
but without effect, and the whole mass started moving southeast 
towards the high hills. This gave me a chance and by a run of about 
half a mile I headed them off and shot four, which was quite enough 
for our wants. Natkusiak later in the day shot a fifth. 

It seemed to us that the caribou here were of a different type from 
any farther west. They were somewhat smaller. The bulls among 
them had very big horns, and all the animals were much lighter colored 
and had a differently shaped head from those we were used to. The 
caribou farther west have what might be described as clean faces, 
or faces reminding one somewhat of horses. These eastern caribou 
have fuzzy or donkey-like faces, with the eyes appearing deep set 



242 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

through the length of the hair on the face, and with an appearance of 
thickness of the face below the eyes, caused no doubt largely by the 
growth of hair. Of course the cow caribou, as the ones we killed 
were, could not be expected to be in good flesh at this time of year, 
but still we did not find them quite so poor as might have been ex- 
pected. 

The next day after the deer killing we spent in making a cache 
in the form of a log cabin for the safe keeping of our meat. Of course 
this is not really a safe cache, but if the logs are big it will take the 
wolverines several days to gnaw through them. We also set and 
baited several dead fall traps, partly because we wanted wolverine 
skins and partly with the hope that if we were able to trap the first 
two or three that visited the cache, we might return to it before the 
fourth one had had time to gnaw its way through. 

April 4th we reached the place at which we had the previous 
spring cached our sled and other belongings that we could not carry 
with us on the Barren Ground hunt. We found all of these safe, 
although both grizzly bears and wolverines had been there and had 
knocked things about a good deal. But there was nothing in the 
whole lot which they recognized as food, and everything was care- 
fully packed in the strong oak boxes which had formerly held our 
small supply of malted milk. We found these boxes of scarcely 
less value than the milk itself had been, for they kept our diaries, 
writing materials, photograph films, and things of that sort safe 
through all weather and protected from all animals. We left be- 
hind here one of the toboggans and took the high sled instead, which 
was much better adapted for work on the coast. 

Something like thirty miles south of Coronation Gulf there appear 
hills of the same peculiar formation which is found in the islands of 
the gulf itself. In other words, each hill consists of a gradual slope, 
say 15° or 20° upward from northwest to southeast, ending finally 
in a precipice of greater or less height facing southeast. In traveling 
southwest through this country in foggy weather in summer I had 
often found these slopes so gradual as to be unnoticed by me until 
of a sudden I was on the brink of a precipice down which it was 
often very difficult to scramble. 

A comparison of these terraces with the islands in Coronation 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 243 

Gulf brings out the similarity strikingly. The terraces are formed 
of columnar basalt, underlaid, in the case of the islands at least, by 
stratified limestone. The result of these formations in Coronation 
Gulf is that there are shallows and dangerous reefs running to the 
northwest from most of the islands, while deep water is found close 
up to the precipices which form the southeast ends of the islands. 

The passing of Bloody Fall had been dangerous the preceding 
spring, but was a safe and simple thing at this time of year. It 
had some appearance of danger, which I think was an appear- 
ance only, for the ice must have been very thick. It was hanging 
ice, however, or in other words there was an air space between it* 
and the water below, and a formation of that kind is always open 
to suspicion. If there is a break, the accident is certain to be fatal 
to any man or beast who happens to be on top of the ice when it 
breaks, for it would be but an instant until the cake that broke off 
would be swept under the rim of ice in the whirlpool below the falls. 

On the evening of April 4th we abandoned the Coppermine two 
miles north of Bloody Fail and struck straight north about four miles 
to the seacoast, where we camped on finding a few sticks of wood. 
In the spring, when the snow has been melted away by the warm sun, 
fresh drift-wood (most of it, no doubt, from the Coppermine) may 
be found almost anywhere in Coronation Gulf, especially to the east 
of the Coppermine, and more abundantly on the islands than on the 
mainland itself. But at this time of year the finding of a stick of 
wood on any of the shores of the gulf is rare, so that we used to make 
it a practice whenever we sa,w a piece to put it on the sled and haul 
it along until camp time. We had with us also a primus stove and 
a gallon and a half of kerosene, which we had hauled all the way 
from Langton Bay. These we kept to use in an emergency, for at 
this season of the year seals from which we might have obtained 
blubber for fuel are not to be had in Coronation Gulf by any method 
of hunting except the one practiced by the local Eskimo, which de- 
pends partly on the ability of dogs in smelling out the breathing-holes 
of the seals and partly on the skill in that particular kind of waiting 
game which we have elsewhere described. It is a hunting method 
in its essence requiring long delays, and therefore not very well 
adapted to traveling parties that are in a hurry, and kerosene was 



244 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

therefore of great value to us. Had we not had the oil, we could 
of course have gone several days without any fuel at all, but that 
would have been a rather unpleasant experience, for the weather was 
very cold, going down to 50° below zero at night occasionally. 

Naturally we examined every stick of drift-wood we saw. One 
of them told an interesting story. It was a cottonwood log, some 
twenty feet or more in length and fully eighteen inches in diameter at 
the middle. It was a part of the trunk of a large tree evidently, and 
must have come from the Liard River by way of the Mackenzie, for 
in no other place do we know of the growth of cottonwoods of this size. 
This stick must have come from the Mackenzie eastward through Dol- 
phin and Union Straits, which shows that at times at least there must 
be a current sweeping in an easterly direction.' Our own observations 
of Dolphin and Union Straits, both before this time and after, indi- 
cate that through the narrows of the straits and about Lambert 
Island these currents may run with the swiftness of a mill race in 
either direction. They are swift enough, in fact, to keep ice of any 
thickness from forming all winter. But although the currents al- 
ternate in direction, the prevailing winds are northwesterly, and where 
the current is slack a log of wood might be, and in fact often is, driven 
against the current. 

We were on Coronation Gulf in search of people, and we had no 
idea where to look for them, except that we knew that they would 
not be anywhere near shore. We confirmed on entering the gulf 
a fact of which we had seen some indications the previous spring, 
that there are four times as many islands in it as the charts show us. 
Most of these islands occur in chains running about parallel to the 
south shore of the gulf, or tending somewhat offshore as you go east. 
It seemed to us the best plan, therefore, to follow one of these chains 
eastward and to spy from the tops of their high islands with our 
glasses for possible villages out on the ice. Although the snow houses 
themselves are not easily seen at a great distance, an Eskimo village 
on the ice in the spring presents as a whole a dark appearance, on 
account of the wet clothes that are hung up outdoors to be dried and 
because of the blubber bags and the other household belongings 
which are scattered about. 

After traveling to the northeast for a day we found an old snow 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 245 

village, but this had been deserted evidently in the early fall and the 
trail that led away from it had been completely obliterated by the 
blizzards. We proceeded two days northeast after that, but found 
no other traces, and decided then to turn north towards Victoria 
Island. We had gone only about ten miles north, however, when we 
came upon a fresh trail of one sled and four people going east. It was 
to be taken for granted that this sled was coming from one village 
and going to another. We decided to follow its track east rather 
than to retrace it west, and that evening late we came to a commo- 
dious and clean-looking snow house which had evidently been aban- 
doned by the party we were following not more than two days be- 
fore. We had found no fuel that day, and to save ourselves the 
trouble of making camp we moved into the house, for it was quite big 
enough for us. 

A new camp is warmer than an old one, for a new snow house is 
a snow house, but an old one is an ice house. This particular one had 
evidently been kept pretty warm by its former occupants, for the 
walls were solid, glistening ice. We were all warm from fast travel, 
and in our hurry to get the camp heated up we closed the door tightly. 
The bed-platform was just wide enough for three, and we were all 
sitting on the front edge of it, with the exception of Natkusiak, who 
was sitting on the floor. I was a little higher than the rest, for the 
cooking was my job that night, and I had set the primus stove on a 
block of snow and was on my knees cutting up snow into the kettle 
to make water. Tannaumirk and Natkusiak were talking and jok- 
ing as usual. In the midst of one of his funny stories, which he told 
with a good deal of pantomime, Tannaumirk all at once threw him- 
self backward upon the bed and made a sort of gurgling noise. Ander- 
son was sitting next to him. All three of us thought that these ac- 
tions and gurglings were a part of the pantomime accompanying the 
story; still I asked Anderson to look and see what Tannaumirk 
was up to, for he did not get up again as quickly as we expected. 
When Dr. Anderson turned to look, he fell down face forward on top 
of Tannaumirk. I knew then in a twinkle what the matter was 
and immediately extinguished the primus stove, for it was clear that 
we were being poisoned by coal gas, which is so insidious a thing 
that under ordinary circumstances one does not notice its presence. 



246 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Natkusiak, to whom the phenomenon was a strange thing, saw noth- 
ing to be alarmed at, and when I told him to immediately break a 
hole in the snow wall back of where he was sitting, he went about it 
with deliberation. Fortunately, in order to make the hole he had 
to get up to reach for his knife which he had stuck into the wall. 
When he tried to arise he found himself powerless to do so, and that 
scared him so that with his last strength he threw himself back against 
the wall and broke away the loose block of snow by which we had 
a few minutes before closed up the door. He then crawled outdoors 
on all fours, but was too weak to stand up. I followed him out and 
had strength enough to stand up after getting out, but that was 
only for a moment and I fell down beside Natkusiak. 

It was a calm, starlit night, with the temperature about 45° below 
zero, and the situation was evidently serious, for all of us were lightly 
clad. My first thought was to try to get back into the house and 
drag Anderson and Tannaumirk out, and I crawled to the opening 
for that purpose, but was so weak that it was evident I could do noth- 
ing if I did go in. 

It must have been fifteen minutes that we lay flat outside the 
snow house before Anderson's face appeared at the hole in the wall. 
His mind was clear apparently, but he had no realization of what 
had happened and asked us in a querulous voice what we were doing 
out there and why we had put out the stove and let the cold air into 
the house. Before I had time to answer him, however, he realized 
what had happened and crawled out and started walking about and 
drawing into his lungs as deep breaths of air as possible. He soon 
found, however, as I had found a few minutes before, that this was 
the worst possible thing to do, and he had to stretch himself out flat 
on the ground like the rest of us. 

It must have been another ten minutes until Tannaumirk also 
came to his senses and crawled out. By that time I, who had been 
less affected from the beginning than any of the others, had strength 
enough to fetch from the house our sleeping bags, into which I helped 
Anderson and Natkusiak to crawl. Tannaumirk would not crawl 
into the bag, saying that if he did he would no doubt go to sleep in 
it and freeze to death. He had been much worse affected than the 
rest of us and while we seemed to be able to think clearly his mind 






d a5 lO 


s 


M 




o 

o 


H 


3 
^ 


o 


o 


« 




-<! 


CO 


P 


;:2 


O 


o 



» o 



CO CO 



fq 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 247 

was evidently in a fog, as his remark about freezing to death in a 
sleeping bag showed. After walking around camp in a circle two or 
three times he started straight off somewhere. He then seemed to 
realize vaguely that he was getting lost, but had it not been for my 
loud shouting he would not have found his way back to camp again, 
for, although the moonlight was bright, he said later that either he 
was unable to see the camp or else he did not have the sense to recog- 
nize it when he did see it. 

After Tannaumirk's return from this excursion I forced him into 
the sleeping bag, and then went indoors and lit the primus stove 
again and cooked a potful of malted milk. Nearly a year before 
when we started from Langton Bay we had with us twenty-four one- 
pound cans of malted milk and this was the last can, which we had 
kept for an emergency. It seemed to me that no more serious emer- 
gency was likely to happen and that this was a good time to use it. 
When the milk had come to a boil I called to the others outside, and 
by that time they had all recovered strength enough to crawl out 
of the bags themselves and to come in. 

An hour later the three of us were feeling comparatively fit again 
and the next morning we noticed no ill effects, but Tannaumirk was 
sick not only that night but also the next day. Of course our trouble 
had been from closing the house too tightly. Looking back upon 
our various experiences with primus stoves in the past, I can now see 
that we must many a time have been near a similar outcome before. 
We had this time escaped by a narrow margin, for had I gone off my 
head simultaneously with Tannaumirk and Anderson, there would 
have been no help for us, the stove would have kept on burning, 
generating fresh quantities of coal gas as it did so. It seemed to us 
the next day, and it seems so to me still, that this not very romantic 
adventure was the narrowest escape from death we had on our 
entire expedition. 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE next day, which was April 10th, we continued following 
the same trail east, and towards evening came to a village of 
fifteen persons belonging chiefly to the Nagyuktogmiut and 
Ungasiktagmiut groups, who hunt generally in the south central 
portion of Victoria Island in summer. We spent several days with 
these people in trading with them for ethnological specimens, con- 
sisting chiefly of articles of clothing and household utensils, in- 
cluding stone lamps and stone pots, as well as such implements of 
the chase as bows and arrows, caribou spears, and harpoons. Most 
of these were tipped with copper, although the knives generally had 
blades of iron. Most of the knife-blades were made of gun-barrels. 
This comes about through the fact that the Eskimo who trade with 
the Hudson's Bay Company and with whalers on Hudson's Bay buy 
guns and carry them west to a district where ammunition cannot 
be had, and then trade them off to Eskimo still farther west, who 
have no use for them as guns, having no ammunition or any 
knowledge of their use, and who therefore beat them up into 
knife-blades. 

We discovered here the answer to a problem of long standing in 
the ethnology and archaeology of the western Eskimo. If you ask 
in any village from Point Hope east, " Where did you get your steatite 
stone lamps and pots ?" the answer is invariably, "We got them from 
the next people east of us." At Point Barrow it is said that they 
came from the mouth of the Colville and from Barter Island ; the 
Colville people say that they were purchased by them at Barter 
Island from the Herschel Island Eskimo, and the Herschel Islanders 
say they got them from the east edge of the Mackenzie delta and 
they in turn got them from the Baillie Islanders, who say that they 
^>x)btained them in two ways : first, by trading with people east of 
them along the coast, and secondly, by making trips across the strait 

248 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 249 

from Cape Parry to Nelson Head and buying them from the inhabit- 
ants of Banks Island. 

At Cape Bexley the previous spring we had noted the abundance 
and excellence of the stone lamps and pots and had asked the people 
where they got them. Their answer had been that sometimes they 
purchased them from people to the east, and sometimes individuals 
of their own tribe went east to the place where suitable stone could 
be found and made their own pots and lamps. This place they had 
named to us as Utkusiksalik, or the place where there is material 
for pots, and the people who lived in the district they called the Ut- 
kusiksaligmiut. We now found that some of the people in this 
village considered themselves Utkusiksaligmiut and that the place 
where the pot stone was to be found was the mouth of the valley of 
a small river, clearly visible from this village as a V-shaped gap 
in the high hills in the mainland to the south. From this quarry, or 
from others lying between it and Back River, must have come all 
the lamps and pots of the peculiar stone known to the Eskimo as 
tunirktah, found all the way from the Coppermine west to Bering 
Straits; and pending further investigations we may assume that 
utensils of the same stone found even in eastern Siberia among the 
Eskimo and coast Chuckcee must have come from the same sources. 

We purchased here from its maker a lamp forty-three inches long, 
weighing about fifty pounds, which in spite of its being a fragile and 
inconvenient thing to carry has been safely transferred to civilization 
and is now in the American Museum of Natural History. Although 
we saw several larger lamps, we were unable to purchase them from 
their owners, but forty-three inches is considerably more than the 
length of any other lamp known to us as existing in museums. 

I have always been a great admirer of the work of David T. 
Hanbury. Although Franklin's parties, Richardson's, Dease and 
Simpson's, and many others have been over ground adjacent to or 
overlapping that covered by Hanbury, I have always found that in 
all practical matters relating to means and methods of travel, dis- 
tances, etc., and especially in my intercourse with the Eskimo, I have 
derived greater help from Hanbury's book than all the others put to- 
gether. In this village we got a great deal of interesting information 
which would have been incomprehensible to us but for the fact that 



250 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Hanbury speaks of the river which falls into Chesterfield Inlet as 
the Arkilinik, instead of by the name of some European friend of 
his, or by that of the Thelon as it is designated on ordinary maps. 
Through knowing this name I discovered that a girl of about fourteen 
in the village had been with her parents on a trip to get sled-making 
materials from the wooded portion of the same river which Hanbury 
traversed, or in other words had been but a short way from Baker 
Lake, which in turn is near the head of Chesterfield Inlet. She had 
never seen a white man down there, however, although we found in 
the village some white men's trinkets which her people had brought 
from this journey, and which they had secured from Eskimo who 
themselves had seen white men. 

Another man in the village, named Iglihsirk, had seen Hanbury 
himself on Dismal Lake, as Hanbury has recorded in his book. There 
are many evidences in that book that the Hudson's Bay Eskimo upon 
whom Hanbury depended as interpreters had great difiiculty in un- 
derstanding the language of the Coronation Gulf Eskimo, and we 
had one more proof of the fact in that Iglihsirk had understood Han- 
bury's Eskimo to tell him that he and his two white companions 
intended coming back the next year. When they did not come back, 
the belief grew up among the Coppermine Eskimo that Hanbury 
had been murdered by his companions, and for that reason a girl 
of about four years of age had been named Ihumatak, which was 
considered to be Hanbury's name. 

This in itself was a key to another thing that had remained a riddle 
in my mind. It is a great pity that a man who was so long with the 
Eskimo as Charles Francis Hall was unable to learn their language 
and therefore to give us any considerable amount of interesting in- 
formation about their beliefs and customs. He does tell us inciden- 
tally the word that the Eskimo in King William Island had applied 
to Sir John Franklin and to Captain Crozier. This he gives as 
Eshemeeuta. Ever since I first saw that word in print I have kept 
wondering what possible etymology it could have. Hall's spelling 
is such as to completely disguise the facts in the case. The word 
ihumatak however is clear; it means "he who has forethought," or 
in other words, " he who does the thinking or deciding for the party," 
which is another way of saying "commander." Evidently the Coro- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 251 

nation Gulf Eskimo had heard the Hudson's Bay Eskimo speak in this 
way of Hanbury, and the idea of a man being master of other men 
being entirely strange to them, they supposed that this was Han- 
bury's name instead of his title. But the fact that Hudson's Bay 
men called their commander isumatak (which becomes ihumatak in 
the Coronation Gulf dialect) made it entirely probable that this was 
the word which the King William Island natives had used of Franklin. 
Knowing this, it becomes possible to show with a degree of certainty 
that this is the word which Hall meant to write down. 

In passing it may be said here that the great differences which at 
first appear to exist between an eastern Eskimo dialect written down 
by one man, and an Alaskan dialect written by another, are chiefly 
matters of phonography. To one who knows an Alaskan Eskimo 
dialect a word written by Thalbitzer for Greenland is clear as day in 
meaning, though Hall's phonography or Parry's would disguise it 
effectively. 

Through our inquiries here we learned that a flourishing inter- 
tribal trade exists between Hudson's Bay and Kent peninsula, started 
by the Eskimo who accompanied Hanbury on his journey. Every 
winter now there arrives at the village of Umingmuktok on Kent 
peninsula a tribe known to the Coronation Gulf people as Pallirg- 
miut, named, as they say, from a branch river "Pallirk," which flows 
into the Akkilinik. In the winter of 1909-1910 there was said to 
have accompanied these Pallirgmiut to Umingmuktok a white man 
they call Kaksamina, who returned with them to the south again after 
a trading visit of a week or two. It seems possible that this may be 
a young white man who was lost from Hudson's Bay the year before, 
but it is by no means sure, for the Coronation Gulf Eskimo did not 
consider me a white man, but did consider white the Indians of 
Bear Lake, with whom, of course, they had had no dealings. It is 
possible, therefore, that the so-called white man may have been merely 
an Eskimo of another tribe than the Pallirgmiut, if not one of the 
Pallirgmiut themselves. 

In this group we met some people who had evidently traveled 
farther abroad than any we had previously seen. Up to this time 
I had asked every one we met whether Victoria Island was an island 
or not, and they had invariably agreed that it was not an island ; 



252 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

in other words, that there was no other side to it or sea sur- 
rounding it, but in this village there were several people who 
expressed themselves definitely as knowing that there was an east 
side to the island. One of these, Iglihsirk, I questioned to see if he 
knew anything about the loss of Franklin's ships. I asked him if 
he had ever heard that a ship had been wrecked on the east coast 
of Victoria Island, and what he knew about the fate of the men who 
had been on the ship. He said so far as he knew no ship had been 
wrecked on the east coast, but that in his father's time tivo ships had 
frozen fast in the ice a long loay offshore, beyond the east coast, and 
the white men on them had evidently abandoned them and all died. 
This was clear proof that they were familiar with Franklin's story. 
Had the man answered my leading question offhand, saying that 
one ship had been wrecked on the coast, it might have been considered 
one of the cases of politeness among the Eskimo, who usually answer 
any question in the way they think you would like to have it answered, 
but he had corrected me exactly in accordance with the facts already 
known to us, for Franklin's ships were not on the coast, but a consider- 
able distance from it, and were abandoned before the ice broke up. 

This was the very man whom Hanbury saw on Dismal Lake 
and who, according to Hanbury's account, was familiar with the 
Bloody Fall tragedy in which Samuel Plearne and his Chipewyan 
were concerned in 1771, but when I asked him he said he knew 
nothing of it. Evidently this is another case where Hanbury's 
interpreters were at fault. I asked him whether his ancestors had 
not been in the habit of fighting now and then with the Indians on 
the Coppermine River. Oh, yes, they had, whenever they met. 
But did they ever fight at Bloody Fall ? No, not so far as he knew ; 
not in that particular place. He had never heard of Eskimo killing 
Indians or Indians killing Eskimo at Bloody Fall. Long before he 
was born his father had, he said, seen white men near the mouth of 
the Rae River. This must no doubt have been Dease and Simpson's 
party, for although Iglihsirk himself, as we learned from outside 
sources, was a child of five or six at the time that Richardson visited 
Rae River, he and his parents were not present at the time. 

We had here a striking example of how easy it is to be misled by 
native information. I had been led to believe in the spring that the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 253 

Coronation Gulf people never had had any knowledge of the killing 
of bow-head whales, although they were familiar with the carcasses 
of those that had drifted up on their beaches. Neither had they 
apparently ever seen a live one, which is not strange, considering 
the two facts that bow-head whales are not only no doubt very rare 
in these waters, but the people themselves are always inland in the 
summer time and are therefore not in a position to see the whales 
even if they might come into these waters in July or August. But 
here at this village and now for the first time, after vain inquiries 
all summer, we heard various stories of whale killings, most of them, 
however, centering about a single man whom they called Kaplavinna. 
They told how this person had on occasion even killed several whales 
in one day, and how he had a very large boat. This again was new 
information, for up to that time we had heard nothing about anything 
but kayaks. In the spring, in fact, the people had seemed to be un- 
familiar with the very name of umiak. 

I listened to several of these stories with great wonder and asked 
many questions which were readily answered, but which threw no 
great light on the subject, until it occurred to me to ask one of the 
narrators, " Who told you this story ? Did you get it from your 
father ? " The man said : " No, I got it from Natjinna." Now Nat- 
jinna had been a camp follower of ours all summer, and I had asked 
him specifically in the spring both about bow-head whales and umiaks 
and he knew nothing about either. It seemed strange to me that 
Natjinna should have misled me so in the summer, and I made up 
my mind to take him to task for it when I saw him. Two or three 
weeks later, when I happened to meet him, I asked how was it that in 
the spring he had been unwilling to tell me anything about whales 
or big boats and now he told long stories to others about them. " Oh, 
but those were the stories that Natkusiak told me," he answered. 

It turned out on investigation that my own man, Natkusiak, was 
the fountain-head of all these stories, and that the redoubtable whaler 
Kaplavinna was none other than Natkusiak's former employer. 
Captain Leavitt of the steam whaler Narwhal. These were the local 
versions, changed to fit the circumstances and geography of Corona- 
tion Gulf, and translated into terms comprehensible to the Copper- 
mine Eskimo. I had heard Natkusiak telling these stories the 



254 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

previous spring, but the versions that came to me a year later were 
so changed that they were not recognizable, and had been so thor- 
oughly localized graphically that the narrators could tell me off just 
which Coronation Gulf headland the adventures had taken place. 

Wlien Natkusiak told these stories, as I noticed on many occa- 
sions, he never made any allowances for the fact that he was dealing 
with things entirely strange to the local people. He discussed 
davits, masts, sails, anchors, harpoon guns, dynamite bombs, the 
price of whalebone and the like, exactly as he would have done in his 
own home village at Port Clarence where these are all familiar topics 
and matters of everyday conversation. The very names of these 
things as well as the concepts behind them were absent from the 
vocabularies and the minds of the local people, and the ideas which 
they therefore got from Natkusiak's truthful stories were very far 
from those which would have been gained from the same narratives 
by a people whose everyday experiences made them comprehensible. 

From the seeds sown here by Natkusiak there had grown up a 
local myth about Kaplavinna and his whaling adventures, — a 
myth which Natkusiak himself would have had fully as much trouble 
as I in recognizing, — just exactly as the discussion of the Christian 
religion by a missionary and of a strange social and political system 
by a school teacher gives rise to the most astounding ideas in the 
minds of the Alaskan Eskimo. Very likely it was thus from the 
preaching of an early missionary among them that some Indian origi- 
nally evolved upon the model of Jehovah the Manitou idea, which 
people nowadays use to prove that the tribes of the New England 
wilderness were familiar with the conception of a single superior 
being. 

Another story which we picked up at this time was that of the 
Imnait. These were vague and mysterious animals living in an un- 
known land to the west, which is also inhabited by the Kiligavait. 
This story did not give us nearly so much trouble in identifying it as 
did that of Kaplavinna, for the name of the monster was a correct 
reproduction of that used by my own Eskimo in the previous year 
in telling their adventures in mountain sheep hunting. Mountain 
sheep, of course, are found nowhere east of the Mackenzie River, and 
could not, therefore, be directly known to the Coronation Gulf Es- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 255 

kimo. These people were also unfamiliar with the dangers involved 
in the possible snow-slides and other peculiar conditions of mountain 
hunting. They had received from Natkusiak the general idea that 
mountain sheep hunting was dangerous, and being unable to ascribe 
any danger to the mountains as such, they had transferred the dan- 
gerousness of the snow-slides and precipices to the sheep them- 
selves; and the hairbreadth escapes from death in snow-slides 
which Natkusiak had described became in their version hairbreadth 
escapes from the teeth and claws of the ferocious mountain sheep. 
The kiligavait, which they had associated with the mountain sheep 
in these narratives, were nothing but the mammoth, known to all 
branches of the Eskimo race by name at least, and known here also, 
according to what we were told, by the occasional finding of their 
bones. Of course Natkusiak had told nothing about mammoth 
hunting, but the mysterious mountain sheep naturally allied them- 
selves in their minds with the also mysterious mammoth, and were 
therefore to be coupled together in recounting the same adventures. 
Thus we had a side-light, not only upon the origin of myths among 
primitive people, but also upon the startling rapidity with which 
they grow and change their form. 

Along with these stories of Kaplavinna and the mountain sheep 
we were also told no doubt essentially truthful ones of the trading 
expeditions of certain men of this district to the lakes above the 
head of Chesterfield Inlet, as well as in all probability entirely ficti- 
tious accounts of how certain men had, during the last few years, 
made journeys to the moon. One of the local shamans had for a 
familiar spirit the spirit of a white man, and in seances spoke "white 
men's language." We were present at one of these seances; and 
when I said that I was unable to understand anything of what the 
white man's spirit said through the mouth of the woman whom he 
possessed, it was considered a very surprising thing, and apparently 
inclined some of the people to doubt that I was really a white man 
as I represented myself to be. 

Not only does our experience here show how myths may originate, 
but it also shows how history and fact become mixed with fiction, 
and how facts are likely quickly to disappear, as in reality they do. 
It is impossible among the Eskimo, in the absence of extraneous 



256 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

evidence, to rely upon anything that is said to have happened farther 
back than the memory of the narrator himself extends. 

As we have remarked elsewhere, the mind of the Eskimo is keen 
with reference to their immediate environment, although of course 
unable to grasp things that are outside of their experience. This 
keenness is shown especially in the use which they make of practically 
everything that can be turned to account in their struggle against 
Arctic conditions. Wood is not especially scarce in Coronation 
Gulf; still, substitutes for wood have to be found now and then. 
We saw here a sled which illustrated remarkably the resourcefulness 
of the Eskimo in this matter. A man named Kaiariok, who is the 
son of Iglihsirk and of whom Hanbury speaks as being temporarily 
absent from his father's camp at the time when he visited it on Dismal 
Lake, found himself in the fall in need of a sled and with no wood out 
of which to make one. He then took a musk-ox skin, soaked it in 
water and folded it into the shape of a plank, pressed it flat and 
straight, and carried it outdoors where it could freeze. It froze as 
solid as any real plank, and then with his adze he went to work and 
hewed out of it a sled runner exactly as he would hew one out of a 
plank. On the upper edge of the runner he made notches for the 
crosspieces as he would had it been ordinary spruce, drilled 
holes for the lacings and put in wooden crosspieces, and made a sled 
which I had seen several times without discovering that it was in 
any way different from the ordinary wooden sleds. It was only one 
day when I was thinking of buying a sled that I discovered the dif- 
ference. There were two sleds for sale, and I was told that one of 
them was better than the other because when the weather got warm 
it would still be useful, while the other one would flatten out and 
become worthless in warm weather and was therefore for sale for 
half the price of the first one. This cheaper sled turned out to be 
the musk-ox skin one, for which as an ethnological specimen I would 
have been willing to pay much more than the other, had there been 
any possibility of transferring it unchanged to a museum. There 
was, however, involved the same difficulty that has prevented in such 
places as Montreal the preservation of ice palaces from year to year. 

Of all things that these Eskimo told us, the one that surprised 
us most was the undoubtedly true statement that a ship manned by 



I'Sf 



^ 




MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 257 

white men and strange Eskimo was wintering in Coronation Gulf. 
This we felt as the reverse of good news, for the natural feelings of 
sympathy that had grown up through a year of association with 
these people, who in their way were so infinitely superior to their 
civihzed brethren in the west, made me regret that civilization was 
following so close upon our heels. We had come into the country 
in May, and evidently this ship must have come the following Sep- 
tember. She was wintering, they said, in the mouth of a small river 
about half a day's journey east of the mouth of the Coppermine. 
Seeing she was there, we would of course pay her a visit. We were 
not in particular need of assistance from anybody, but still in a far 
country like this one is always willing either to help or to be helped, 
and there was no doubt that the meeting was likely to be both pleasant 
and profitable to all concerned. In other words, now that the ship 
was there we would make the best of a situation we regretted ; we 
would make what use of her we could and be of as much use to her as 
possible, although had we had our way we should have wished her on 
the other side of the earth. 

After loading up our sleds with far more ethnological specimens 
than our own dogs could haul, we purchased four more dogs to help 
do the hauling and started off for the ship. The camp where we had 
been trading was about twenty miles offshore from the mouth of 
Tree River, and it was therefore about sixty miles southwest to 
where we expected to find the vessel. 

Our new dogs were of course homesick and we dared not unhitch 
them near their homes for fear they would run away, so we trav- 
eled day and night, making about fifty miles before stopping, which 
is a long march when one is freighting a heavy load, although nothing 
particular if one has light sleds. At the end of the fifty miles neither 
ourselves nor our dogs were in reality tired out, but still we had to 
stop, for more than one of us had become so sleepy that it was liter- 
ally impossible to keep awake. What finally stopped us was that 
Dr. Anderson, who was a little way behind, stopped to fix his snow- 
shoe and rolled over asleep on the snow. We had to turn back to 
wake him up and then we went into camp. 

It had been beautiful sunshiny weather, and even at midnight at 
this season of the year it is not quite dark. But when we started 



258 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

again for what we knew would be about ten or twelve miles of travel 
we had slept away our warm sunshiny day, and found ourselves 
traveling in a night which through clouds and fog was dark, although 
it would have been light enough had the sky been clear. We had, 
therefore, not gone more than six or eight miles when we considered 
it wise to camp again for fear of missing the ship, for we were able to 
see but a few hundred yards, and the darkness and the blizzards of the 
last few weeks made it uncertain that we would see any tracks, of 
which there would otherwise naturally be a good many in the neigh- 
borhood of the vessel. It was foggy still on the morning of the 19th 
of April when we pushed ahead again, but although the ship was 
lying in hiding in the bottom of a deep bight, we happened to walk 
right into her. 

The ship was the Teddy Bear, a little gasoline schooner of thir- 
teen tons register, from Nome, Alaska, and had on board but one 
white man, her owner. Captain Joseph Bernard, and a crew consist- 
ing of the Eskimo Tulugak, with his wife and their two children, a 
boy of fifteen and a girl of ten, as well as Tulugak' s mother, and 
his young brother, a child of six or seven. The Teddy Bear had 
wintered the year before at Barter Island and had come east with 
the intention of getting to the west coast of Victoria Island, but 
when Captain Bernard had heard from Captain Wolki at Cape 
Bathurst that my party had gone into Coronation Gulf, he had 
changed his program and had followed us in. In the early fall 
he had met some Eskimo from whom he got hazy accounts of us 
as to where we were wintering (inland and on the Coppermine, they 
had told him, which was not true), and he had made an attempt 
to find us. He had been able to proceed only some thirty or forty 
miles up the Coppermine when he had been forced to return through 
a combination of circumstances consisting of bad going, scarcity of 
game, and the uncertainty of where to look for us. Having been in 
winter quarters here for over seven months without hearing any- 
thing further about us, he had naturally given up all hope of seeing 
us and was therefore almost as surprised when we turned up as we 
had been a few days before when we heard he was there. 

We found Captain Bernard most kind and ready to do us 
any service possible. It took Dr. Anderson and me but an hour 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 259 

or two to change all our plans, for now there presented itself 
the new resource of a ship willing to cooperate with us. Instead 
of making our overland trip from the Dease River to Franklin 
Bay across country, as we had expected, and for which the season 
was getting rather late anyway, we decided that Dr. Anderson, 
Tannaumirk, and Pannigabluk should stay in Coronation Gulf, 
where Dr. Anderson was anxious to carry forward his egg collecting 
and other zoological work, and that I should, with Natkusiak alone 
for companion, go north across Coronation Gulf and across the south- 
western corner of Victoria Island to Prince Albert Sound and thence 
to Banks Island, with the idea of spending the summer with the 
Eskimo tribes which we supposed lived there. In the fall the Teddy 
Bear, on her way west, would make an attempt to pick us up in 
De Salis Bay, on southeastern Banks Island. If she should succeed 
in that, all of course would be well, for she would carry us to Langton 
Bay; but if she failed to find us, through fault either hers or ours, 
we would simply spend the autumn months in Banks Island and 
sledge across south to Cape Parry and Langton Bay the following 
winter as soon as the sea ice got thick enough. 

Captain Bernard undertook to carry for us the stone lamps and 
stone cooking pots we had purchased from the Eskimo, while Dr. 
Anderson and Tannaumirk were to take the remainder of our ethno- 
logical collection and the geological ones up to the mouth of Dease 
River to hand them over either to Hodgson or to Melvill and Hornby, 
who, we knew, would be willing to take them in their big York boat 
to Fort Norman on the Mackenzie River, where they could be given 
into the hands of the Hudson's Bay Company for shipment to New 
York and Ottawa. All of this program was eventually carried out, 
and our geological and ethnological collections, without the loss of a 
single specimen, arrived at their destination in the civilized lands 
about eighteen months after we gathered them in Coronation Gulf. 

On the 30th of April Natkusiak and I accordingly started on one 
of the longest and most difficult of the trips we have taken together, 
although it did not prove quite so long as we had expected. There 
Were only the two of us, but we carried four rifles, for I had hopes of 
being able to hire one of the Victoria Eskimo to accompany us 
to Banks Island, and intended to use one rifle both for him to hunt 



260 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

with while he was with us and to pay him for his services, for 
the Teddy Bear had already commenced trading in rifles and it was 
no longer possible, without the aid of such legislation as no govern- 
ment is likely to be wise enough to make, to confine the Eskimo to 
their bows and arrows for hunting. The extra rifle we carried in 
case one of ours should break, for Captain Bernard was both willing 
and able to give us not only new rifles but also all the ammunition 
we needed. Besides that he furnished us with about forty pounds of 
trading materials, consisting chiefly of knives, files, and needles, with 
which we expected to buy an ethnological collection in Banks Island. 
We would have been able on this occasion to load our sled with as 
many provisions as we liked, for Captain Bernard had an abundance, 
but we preferred to travel light. 

The ice was level and the sun was warm, so that our sleds glided 
along easily. The season was already later than we would have 
wished, so that we did not loiter much by the way, and on the first 
day made something over fifty miles, taking turns in running ahead 
of the dogs. 

It may be well to point out here that our travels, whether they 
were five miles or fifty per day, always meant so many miles of walk- 
ing, for in my entire experience of over 10,000 miles of sled travel 
I have never sat on the sled except when it was going down a steep 
hill, with the exception of one or two occasions when I have been 
suffering from chafed or blistered feet caused by improper footgear. 
It is unfair to the dogs and unwise as a policy to ride on the sled. 
If the dogs can haul you on top of the rest of the load twenty-five 
miles a day, they could haul the load without you thirty or thirty- 
five, and the same principle applies whether you make fifteen or 
fifty miles in a day. The object is never merely to see how many 
weeks and months you can stay away from home, but rather to see 
how many miles you can cover while you are away, and consequently 
you must do nothing to unnecessarily retard your progress. No 
man should engage in Arctic exploration who is unable to walk as 
many miles a day as his dogs are able to haul his sled and camp 
gear. 

It is to be said for a craft which has made great advances in recent 
years that although many of the now dead and gone explorers whose 




Boys of Eight and Six Years, Coronation Gulf. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 261 

names are engraved on the roll of fame as well as printed on ponderous 
volumes, have been little better than baggage hauled along by the 
common men of their expeditions (whose very names seldom find a 
place in the records), the explorers of to-day, the men of the type of 
Peary and Shackleton, are almost without exception both willing 
and able to do their own work in the field and to require of their 
subordinates no more than what they demand of themselves. 

Our course was about due north for Cape Krusenstern, and we 
made it by full dayhght, which now extended up to ten o'clock in 
the evening; but when we turned into Dolphin and Union Straits 
we were in the twilight, for there is in this latitude but a small arc 
of daylight in the north at midnight on the first of May. We knew 
that Lambert Island lies in the middle of the straits, and it seemed 
to me it would be a desirable camping place, for I knew from Eskimo 
report that there was some drift-wood upon it, and I thought I should 
find in this neighborhood the seal-hunting village of the Noahonirg- 
miut. 

At night I always carry my 6-power Zeiss glasses, and with them 
I was able to see the land on either side of the straits although it 
was not visible to the naked eye, as well as the dark mass ahead 
which I knew must be Lambert Island. Besides this I saw scat- 
tered here and there over the ice little black dots that were a mystery 
to us, for none of them were near enough to be identified. One of 
them, however, was straight ahead and we were gradually approach- 
ing it. When we got within two or three hundred yards I turned 
my glasses on it again and found it to be a seal. Now it is not in 
the nature of seals ordinarily at this season of the year to lie on top 
of the ice in the dark of night. The thing was therefore a matter for 
speculation, as was also the large black patch on the ice, beside which 
the seal was lying. 

Ordinarily a seal at this time of year hauls himself out through 
a hole that is barely large enough for the passage of his body. But 
the black spot besides this seal was no small hole, but was evidently 
many square yards in extent, and was therefore a mystery to me 
until the reflection of a star in it all at once made it clear to me that 
it was water. Things I had heard from the Eskimo about the strong 
currents in Dolphin and Union Straits came to my mind only then. 



262 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

I should of course have remembered them earher, before we entered 
the strait. 

I was walking perhaps a hundred yards ahead of Natkusiak, who 
was following with the dog team. I immediately called to him to 
stop and simultaneously lay down flat on the ice, drew out my hunting 
knife, and stabbed it into the ice. There was practically no resist- 
ance and the knife went right through into the water ; the ice was not 
much over an inch thick under about six inches of snow. I had 
only discovered this and turned around to crawl back when Nat- 
kusiak called out that the sled was settling, that it was already stand- 
ing in a pool of water. He realized then as well as I did that we were 
on thin ice. Had the sled remained motionless for a few minutes, 
it would gradually have settled until the ice broke, sending it to the 
bottom. I therefore whistled to the dogs and crawling ahead of 
them made a slow circle and got around to our old trail again, and 
then commenced a retreat parallel to the old trail a half dozen 
yards away from it. Every few yards I tried the ice again with my 
knife and ever\"vvhere it seemed to be about an inch thick, while the 
sled tracks and footprints we had made going west were now black 
with the water that had oozed into them. Going carefully and con- 
tinually testing the ice, we had to return several miles before the ice 
became two or three inches thick, which is a safe thickness. We 
then began working towards the mainland shore, but every now 
and then we came to thinner patches and had to turn back. It 
took us some hours at this rate to get ashore. When we eventually 
got there the sun was high in the sky. 

This was another one of our adventures, brought on, as most adven- 
tures are, by incompetence. I had had positive information of the 
dangerousness of Dolphin and Union Straits, but I had allowed 
myself to forget it, and because the ice was ever;y"where smooth and 
white I had walked thoughtlessly into the danger from which had 
we broken through there would have been no escape, for the current 
flows like a mill race. When crawling back over the ice I had several 
times stopped to listen and could always hear the rustle of the 
water underneath the ice. Even if we had had no positive warning 
from the Eskimo, the fact that Dolphin and Union Straits at this 
point are shallow and less than twenty miles w4de should have made 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 263 

it clear that it was dangerous ground, for they connect the open 
ocean to the west with the large and fairly deep Coronation Gulf to 
the east, and the tide currents are bound to be terrific. _ 

The caribou migrations were now in steady progress. Both in 
Coronation Gulf and in Dolphin and Union Straits we crossed every 
half mile or so the beaten path of a band that had moved north 
ahead of us, and we saw marching bands on every hand. On the 
afternoon of the 1st of May, after our adventure with the thin ice, 
when it came time for us to cross from the mainland to Lam- 
bert Island, we waited an hour or so until a band of some twenty 
caribou passed us going north towards the island, and then we fol- 
lowed in their tracks with the idea that if they came upon weak ice 
they would fall through and by so doing give us ample warning. 
Their march was zigzag and took us considerably out of our way, 
but we followed their path rigorously and got across safely. As a 
matter of fact we passed over on very thin ice. I tested it fre- 
quently and found it nowhere over two inches in thickness. 



CHAPTER XVII 

JUST northeast of the east end of Lambert Island we found, as 
we had expected, the village of the Noahanirgmiut Eskimo, con- 
sisting chiefly of old friends and hunting companions of ours 
from the Bear Lake hunt of the summer before, but there were with 
them also a few families we had not seen. The Eskimo visit about a 
great deal, and although it is always possible for any one to say, "This 
is the village of such and such a people," still you are almost sure to 
find in any village members of one or more other tribes and generally 
of several. These visits are sometimes temporary, but commonly a 
family leaves its own tribe and joins another to be with it a period of a 
year, returning home at the end of that time, although sometimes the 
visit is only for a summer. A man who is in need of a new sled or a 
new bow, but whose own tribe hunts in a woodless country, may, for 
instance, join for the summer hunt a group that intends to go south 
to Bear Lake, in order to supply himself with the wood he needs. 
The Noahanirgmiut were still living on seal meat and were mak- 
ing no attempt to kill any of the numerous caribou that were contin- 
ually migrating past. I thought at first that there might be some 
taboo preventing them from hunting caribou on the ice, but this they 
told me was not so. It was simply that they had never hunted cari- 
bou on the ice and had not considered it possible. It would in fact 
be a fairly hopeless thing for them to try it; and while no doubt 
some of them might occasionally secure an animal, they would 
waste so much time that the number of pounds of meat they 
obtained in a week's hunt in that way would be but a small frac- 
tion of the amount of seal meat they might have secured in the same 
time. Besides that, this is the season which the Eskimo give up to 
the accumulation of blubber for the coming year. Fresh oil is not 
nearly so palatable or digestible as oil that has been allowed to fer- 

264 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 265 

ment in a sealskin bag through the summer, and besides that it is 
difficult often to get seals in the fall. By getting seals in the spring, 
therefore, they secure an agreeable article of diet for the coming 
autumn and provide themselves as well with a sort of insurance 
against hard luck in the fall hunt. Each family will in the spring be 
able to lay away from three to seven bags of oil. Such a bag con- 
sists of the whole skin of the common seal. The animal has been 
skinned through the mouth in such a way that the few necessary 
openings in the skin can be easily sewed up or tied up with a thong. 
This makes a bag which will hold about three hundred pounds of 
blubber, so that a single family's store of oil for the fall will run from 
nine hundred to two thousand pounds. 

To completely test the matter of whether there was a taboo or 
not, as well as to provide ourselves with fresh meat and our friends 
with a feast, Natkusiak and I intercepted one of the bands out of 
which he shot one and I shot three, two of the three, by the w^ay, 
being killed in one shot as the animals were running past at a dis- 
tance of about three hundred yards. The Eskimo immediately 
went at the skinning energetically, and I photographed them while 
they were at it. The meat was then cut up and divided equitably 
among all the families and the cooking began at once. 

It is a theory which has been much in vogue among ethnolo- 
gists that the fundamental reason back of the system of Eskimo 
taboos is that they are intended to keep the sea industries away from 
the land industries and the sea animals away from the land animals ; 
the theory being that the Eskimo were once inland dwellers and 
accustomed only to land animals and hunting methods suited to 
the land, and that when they came down to the sea they found its 
requirements and its animal life so different from that of the land to 
which they were used that they conceived it necessary to keep the 
two rigidly apart and that taboos were therefore established. We 
have elsewhere pointed out that the western Eskimo consider t|iat 
sudden death, pestilence, or famine will follow upon the sewing of 
caribou skin garments within a certain number of days after one of 
the large sea mammals has been killed. It is true among many 
tribes of Eskimo that caribou skin garments must not be made or 
mended on the sea ice. The flesh of caribou and of seals must not, 



266 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

among some tribes, be eaten at the same time, nor must the flesh of 
caribou be eaten on the sea at all. Under other circumstances 
when both may be eaten, they will have to be cooked in separate 
utensils and certain ceremonies have to be performed to cancel, as 
it were, the evil effects that might otherwise ensue. 

Here, however, everything was different. Not only did these 
seal hunters engage in the cutting up of the animals, but the meat 
was taken home and cooked in the same pots in which seal meat had 
been cooked and eaten ; and not only the same day that seal meat had 
been eaten and the seals had been killed, but the seal meat and cari- 
bou meat were actually eaten at the same meal by the same indi- 
viduals. One old man, however, said that he knew that it was not 
right to boil caribou meat in the same pot in which seal meat had 
been boiled unless you suspended the pot by a different string. 
His wife therefore took off the old greasy string which had served 
as a bale for the stone pot, braided a new sinew string, and swung 
the pot by that over the lamp. These Eskimo have various taboos 
relating to seal and to caribou, but none of those that I have seen in 
use or heard of, except in the case of this one incident of the string, 
had any tendency to keep the two apart. 

There were in this village two brothers whom I much admired, and 
one of them, called Hupgok, I had had in mind trying to engage along 
with his family for the Banks Island journey. He would have been 
very glad to go with us, he said, but a child had been recently born 
in his family and he did not think it wise to go off on a long journey. 
This was a great disappointment to me, for he was the only man I 
knew who was likely to have the enterprise to pick up and leave his 
own country to go to a distant land of which he knew nothing. 

This party had come from the west, where they had been sealing 
in Simpson Bay and trading with the Cape Bexley Eskimo of the 
mainland and the Point Williams ones from Victoria Island, as 
well as the Simpson Bay tribe proper, who are known as the Puip- 
lirgmiut. By following their trail, they told us, we should come in a 
short day's travel to the village still occupied by the Puiplirgmiut as 
well as by a few members of other tribes, although the main bodies 
had already moved ashore to the mainland or to Victoria Island, 
according to their inclinations, for the summer hunt. 




Eskimo skinning the First Caribou they had seen shot with a Rifle. 




Spring Tent of Eskimo, South Shore of Coronation Gulf, Late April. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 267 

When we started we followed the trail by which this party- 
had arrived, and found eventually a village of five houses some 
six or eight miles east of Liston Island. Here we engaged to go 
with us to Banks Island a man whom we knew well and liked in a 
social way, but in whom we had no great confidence. He had, how- 
ever, an excellent wife, which was the main consideration, for 
Natkusiak and I were well able to provide food and raw material 
for clothing, but we needed an able woman to do sewing for us and 
especially for making waterproof sealskin boots, without which a 
summer on the swampy tundra and more especially a spring on the 
water-covered spring ice were very disagreeable things to face. I 
was a little surprised to find Kirkpuk and his wife willing to go with 
us, for they had a baby not more than six or eight weeks old, but 
they told me that they would leave the child with its grandmother, 
and that the arrangement was one that they had contemplated 
anyway ; for had Kirkpuk not gone with us, he would, he said, have 
gone on a long hunt to Bear Lake, upon which journey the child 
would have been a burden, especially as he had another one, a boy 
of five or six. It was necessary, Kirkpuk told us, that we wait a 
day or two while his wife finished cutting up blubber and putting it 
in bags for the summer. Most of these he would give to his wife's 
father to cache on the mainland, but one bag we were to take along 
with us to cache on Victoria Island, with the idea of his using it 
next fall when he was returning from Banks Island to his own 
country. 

In order to put the people in as good humor as possible, I told 
Natkusiak to go out and try to get one or more bearded seals, of 
which there were great numbers in this neighborhood. Dolphin 
and Union Straits, wherever they are narrow enough so that the cur- 
rent keeps the ice thin, are stocked with seals beyond any part of the 
Arctic Ocean known to me or to our Eskimo. And not only are there 
plenty of seals, but most of these are of the valuable bearded variety 
(Phoca harhata), one of which is easily equal to four common seals 
(Joetida) either in blubber or in meat. Curiously enough the eastern 
Eskimo do not use the bearded seal skins for boot soles, as do those 
farther west, but employ them entirely as material for ropes. 

On the morning when we crossed from the mainland to Lambert 



268 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Island I had, standing at sea level, counted with the naked eye over 
forty seals within a radius of two miles, basking in the sun, and more 
than three fourths of these were bearded seals. In this locality the 
bearded seal cannot be taken by the ordinary Eskimo method of 
hunting, which is to approach him by crawling up and playing seal 
and finally harpooning him. To try this would here be equivalent 
to an attempt at suicide by the hunter, for the ice is so thin that in 
order to pass over it safely at all the Eskimo in many places have to 
crawl on all fours or wiggle along on their stomachs, so as to distrib- 
ute the weight of the body over a large area of ice ; if they stood up, 
they would break through. If on such ice a man were to harpoon 
a big seal or even a small one and try to hold him, there could be 
but one result. The ice would be broken by the struggle into small 
cakes, and the man would be pulled into the water. With a rifle 
this is all different, inasmuch as you can shoot your seal dead, then 
attach a line to him and carefully crawl away to a distance before 
you commence pulling, because the ice is always even thinner than 
elsewhere in the immediate vicinity of the seal's hole. 

Although bearded seals are common einough in many districts 
inhabited by the eastern Eskimo, their taking is a rare thing. It 
is seldom or never attempted in the spring when they are basking on 
the ice, and only rarely in winter, when it is done by the ordinary 
waiting method described elsewhere, and with two men working 
together. Occasionally a man will spear a bearded seal thinking 
it is an ordinary one, in which case, if he be a stout hunter, he some- 
times gets the beast and is considered a hero for it by all his country- 
men. But sometimes the harpoon line proves too weak and the 
valuable harpoon head is carried off by the animal. Occasionally, 
when the line does not break, the man is not strong enough to hold 
the seal and the line and all are carried off. 

Among a tribe whom we visited at another time a boy of fourteen 
unknowingly harpooned a bearded seal through a breathing-hole, 
and in order to hold him he wrapped the line around his waist. Only 
one thing could happen, for the seal was as strong as several boys 
of that age, and he drew the young fellow crosswise of the hole, 
which at that season was only four inches or so in diameter, and 
held him there a prisoner for several hours, until a man finally went 




Coronation Gulf Hunters with Bows and Arrows. 




Palaitak. 



NOGASAK. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 269 

out to look for him, and found him lying there across the hole. 
The boy and man together were able to enlarge the hole, haul the 
animal up through, and kill him. An adventure of this kind does 
not happen often, and no doubt will be told by that boy and his 
relatives as long as he lives. 

There was great rejoicing in the village when it was learned that 
Natkusiak was going seal-hunting, and all the men were anxious to 
go with him, partly to secure their legal share of the booty and partly 
to see hunting with a rifle. Only three of those in the village had been 
with us the previous summer, and they were the only ones who had 
ever seen an animal killed with a bullet. 

As a matter of local law there were two or three hunters who 
would not have needed to go along in order to get a share of the game, 
for in the division of the spoils only one piece of the seal goes to each 
household, irrespective of how many hunters representing it are 
present. The rule is that when a bearded seal is killed, the man 
who does the killing takes his stand in a conspicuous place near the 
dead animal and makes signals, usually by swinging out his arms at 
right angles. All those hunters near enough so they can see the sign 
come running up. Then the animal is divided into as many seg- 
ments as there are families represented by the hunters present ; and 
when the cutting up has been done, the most influential person present 
has the first choice, which means that he takes the biggest and best 
piece, while the hunter himself, irrespective of his standing in the 
community, takes the last and therefore the poorest piece; but he 
has the honor, which is no small thing among them, for not only is 
the deed considered one of prowess but the man who provides so 
much food for the community thereby becomes a public benefactor, 
; ind gets a valued reward in the consciousness of increased public 

e. steem. 
•e . 

• ^ While the other hunters were away I passed the time in writing 

up my diary and in the occasional pursuit of bands of caribou that 

wei "e passing. They were however more than usually wary that day 

for some reason, and I secured only two. Late in the evening the 

seal 3rs came home successful. Natkusiak had shot two bearded 
.r 

seals \^ although one of them had been on such thin ice that they had 
been ^ compelled to approach it slowly and carefully after it was shot, 



270 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO. 

with the result that the warm blood from the wound made the 
place in which the body lay so slippery that the carcass slid of its 
own weight into the water and was lost. 

When one shoots seal on solid ice, the ordinary procedure is to 
drop one's gun immediately after it is fired and to run at top speed 
to the seal. It has happened to me many a time that after a fifty- 
yard sprint I have barely caught the animal by his hind flipper as 
he was beginning to slide, and it has happened oftener yet that I 
have been too late and have merely seen the splash as the animal 
disappeared in the water. Running of course was not to be thought 
of on the thin ice upon which Natkusiak hunted that day. The 
other seal had not slid from where he lay when shot, and had accord- 
ingly been saved and cut in six segments for the six native families 
represented, for Natkusiak had told them that as we were the guests 
of the village at the time and were not doing our own housekeeping, 
he did not consider we were entitled to a share. 

Although it was blowing a stiff breeze the next day we started 
off north, for I was beginning to fear that the spring currents might 
break up the ice between Victoria and Banks Islands and make our 
proposed crossing to Banks Island impossible. I was anxious, never- 
theless, to see as many as possible of the natives through whose coun- 
try we were passing, so that we camped that evening earlier than usual 
because of coming to a crossroads where one new trail led northward 
to Victoria Island and another on eastward, both having been made 
within a day or two. We expected in the morning to be able to see 
one or more camps if the weather was clear. 

The next morning the weather had changed, but so, unfortu- 
nately, had Kirkpuk's mind. During the night he and his wife -. 
had had time to think of many things : how badly they would mis ,s 
their baby if they did not see him for a year, and of how they migl it 
never see him again for all they knew, going as they were with us 
into a dangerous and mysterious country ; and anyway, Kirkpuk r low 
recollected he had promised So-and-so that he would meet him t hat 
summer at Bear Lake. After breakfast he presented to me tl lese 
and other reasons of the same sort without end which made it im per- 
ative that he should break his agreement with us and retun a. I 
was a little unreasonably annoyed at this change of mind. 1 "'here 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 271 

was nothing wrong about it from the Eskimo point of view. These 
people know nothing among themselves except absolute social 
equality. The relation of master and man is an unknown thing 
among them and therefore inconceivable. A promise according to 
their way of thinking means merely that a man tells you what he 
feels like doing at that particular moment, and so long as his mind 
does not change he will be willing to carry out that intention ; but 
whenever he does change his mind there is nothing to be done but 
to inform you that his mind has been changed, and the explanation 
is considered satisfactory and the agreement dissolved. Yesterday 
Kirkpuk had intended to go with me to Banks Island and he had told 
me so ; this morning he intended to go to Bear Lake and accordingly 
informed me of that fact. The Esldmo individually behaves like a 
sovereign state. The laws of others do not bind him, and he makes 
new laws for himself whenever he likes. 

There was nothing for it but to bid farewell to Kirkpuk and 
to continue on the journey north. Before we parted that morn- 
ing two families of the Puiplirgmiut came up to our camp, traveling 
eastward along one of the trails at the intersection of which our camp 
was pitched, and they visited with us a few hours — long enough to 
tell us the names of several conspicuous landmarks visible from 
where we were, which indicated how we might find the next vil- 
lage north without following the trail, which would be circuitous. 
They also had their photographs taken and their heads measured, 
as did nearly every one whom we saw during our entire year in the 
east. 

We did not have to go over eight miles till we came to a camp of 
five houses, pitched on the ice about ten or twenty yards from shore, 
at the northeast corner of Simpson Bay. We were engaged with the 
help of some of the local men in pitching our tent about two hun- 
dred yards from the village when we noticed a man, evidently stone 
blind, come walking towards us, feeling about with a long cane as a 
blind man does. Two or three children stood watching him and kept 
warning him of the tide cracks, which were numerous here in the ice as 
they are everywhere near shore. The children kept shouting to him : 
"Turn to the right ! Turn to the left ! Again to the left ! Now 
watch out for a tide crack ! " These cracks are dangerous to a man 



272 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

who walks carelessly, for they are often covered with snow so as to 
be invisible and are wide enough for a man's foot to slip in, with con- 
siderable danger not only of a bad fall but of breaking a bone. With 
skill acquired through long blindness he avoided the tide cracks 
dexterously and walked straight up to where the children's voices 
told him that I was standing beside our sled, unloading it. 

When he got near he told me that he knew already who Fwas, and 
that very likely I knew who he was, for he was a man so much more 
unfortunate than other men that the story of his misfortune had 
traveled to distant places. No doubt I had heard the story, he said, 
but nevertheless he would tell it to me himself so that I might know 
it from his own lips and take warning from it and tell my friends to 
do the same. 

Many years ago his house had been standing by itself some 
distance from the village, but from where he stood beside the 
seal-hole watching for the seal to come up he could see several other 
hunters out sealing. The seal, when it came, proved to be a bearded 
one, but being a strong man he had been able to hold it and to kill 
it. Without any assistance he had with his ice pick enlarged the 
breathing-hole enough to pull the animal out. (It was no mean feat, 
seeing that a bearded seal will weigh from six hundred to eight hun- 
dred pounds.) Up to this time he had not thought of the other 
hunters, but now he looked around and saw that they were all far 
away, and while distinctly visible he felt sure that none of them 
had any idea what kind of a seal he had caught. (The hunters' 
law does not require that the hunters within sight be summoned 
to share at the cutting up of a common small seal.) When a 
bearded seal is killed all the hunters within view must be called in 
to share the prize. 

It had occurred to him that by keeping the thing secret (by pre- 
tending this was a common seal), he might keep the animal to him- 
self, and especially the skin, for he knew that he could sell pieces 
of it to a neighboring tribe who seldom catch bearded seals, for 
numerous articles of value. Accordingly he secretly cut the animal 
up, gave out the story that he had killed only a small seal, and pledged 
his wife to secrecy; but the story leaked out as such stories will. 
People came to him and took away from him both the skin and the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 273 

meat and reproached him bitterly. He now repented his act and 
felt crushed by the disapproval of his people, but his punishment 
was to be made even heavier, for within a year he began to lose his 
eyesight and in another year he was stone blind. Since then he, 
poor miserable man, had been blind and a charge upon the com- 
munity. Thus it was sure to go with those who did wicked things ; 
and while he felt sure that I was a good man, nevertheless to know 
his story would do me no harm, and he wished I would pass it on to 
others, warning them to avoid selfish ways. 

I had never heard this tale before, but Natkusiak told me later 
he had heard it from the Eskimo we had been with the previous 
summer. After this occurrence, whenever we told that we had 
visited this particular village, we were always asked whether we had 
seen the blind man, and then the story would be repeated to us, 
exactly as the blind man had told it, to illustrate how punishment 
comes to those who break the law. 

The blind man and his companions told us that we had come 
ashore just in the right place for beginning our overland journey 
across the mountains to the foot of Prince Albert Sound, for farther 
to the west the mountains are high and difficult to cross, and farther 
to the east we would have had a longer distance to go as well as a 
more difficult road. Right opposite where we now were, they said, 
was the pass they used once every few years when they had occa- 
sion to go to trade for copper with the Prince Albert Sound people. 

The commodities which they carry on these trading journeys, they 
told us, were tent poles, sleds, ready-made bows, and the materials 
for arrows, as well as now and then a stone pot or a stone lamp which 
they had secured from the Utkusiksahgmiut. I inquired also where 
they got the wood to trade, and they said that some of it they either 
picked up themselves on journeys to Cape Bexley or purchased from 
the Cape Bexley Eskimo ; but that the best of it, and especially the 
tent poles and the material for bows, they got when now and then a 
family of their tribe went on a summer hunt to Great Bear Lake. 
This confirmed what we knew already — that the Victoria Islanders 
hunt habitually at Bear Lake, and that the presence of a few famihes 
of them there the summer that we were with them was no accident. 

On May 7th, when we started for our crossing of Victoria Island, 



274 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

three of the men accompanied us in the hope that we might meet 
caribou and shoot some, in which case we should of course give them 
some of the meat. Sure enough, after travehng a mile or two and 
before leaving the sea ice for the land, we saw a small band and 
Natkusiak went in pursuit of them. 

While he was gone I looked around carefully with my glasses and 
about half a mile away I saw what looked to me like a stone house. 
I asked the men about it, but they said no, it was merely a rock ; 
and on my pressing the inquiry they said they were sure of it ; there 
were no houses in that neighborhood and they had often seen this 
rock and knew that it was no work of man. The direction in which 
the caribou ran when they went inland made it natural for us to 
pass right by the rock in question. I was about to pass it within 
something like twenty yards when I became convinced that it was no 
single rock, but a pile made by man. I accordingly went up and 
examined it. The men then admitted that it was a house, but they 
said it had not been built by human beings and it would be a bad 
thing to have anything to do with it. I would have liked to examine 
the house carefully, but this was scarcely possible, for the many bliz- 
zards of winter had covered it up so, and evidently filled its interior 
so solidly, that it would have been the work of a day or two, even 
with good shovels, to clean it out so as to get an idea of the interior. 
Unfortunately we had no shovel with us and neither did the Eskimo 
have one. I felt sure too that if they had had one they would not 
have lent it to us for any such purpose as that of prying into this 
house. All the information I could get from them about it was that 
it had been built by the spirits before the human race inhabited the 
land. I happened to be familiar with the fact that in Baffin Land and 
elsewhere in the east there were stone dwellings said to have been built 
by a race of men who were named with a name that differs but slightly 
from the name for spirit. The name given me here was identical 
for that used locally for the familiar spirits of the shamans, and on 
specific inquiry they told me that the spirits who built these houses 
were identical in kind with those employed by the shamans. 

When I asked what the house was like inside, they said first that 
no man who has any sense ever goes inside ; but later on they told me 
that sometimes foolish children in the absence of their parents would 




Crowd at Our Tent, June 14, 1913. 




The Largest Copper Eskimo Village we ever visited — Twenty-seven Snow 

Houses and Tents. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 275 

enter such houses in play ; they in fact had done so themselves when 
they were children. The door, they said, was in the same position 
that an Eskimo house door ordinarily is. In other words, it was 
two and a half or three feet high, on the ground level, and just big 
enough for a man to crawl through it on all fours. The house was 
dome-shaped inside as well as outside and there were no rafters. 
They specifically denied that sods, sticks, or anything else but stones 
appeared in the walls. I asked this question with special reference 
to the manner of constructing stone houses used by the Icelandic 
colony in Greenland, for in Icelandic stone houses sod often is 
employed to fill in the chinks between the stones. On the beach 
here there are any number of flat and angular pieces of rock, and of 
these exclusively the house had been built. One could not tell very 
well about its dimensions because of the mass of snow covering it, 
but it seemed to be not over seven feet high, and very probably 
had an oval floor with transverse diameters no greater than five by 
seven feet. 

After photographing this house as well as the circumstances would 
admit, we proceeded to follow Natkusiak and found that he had 
killed two caribou, one of which I gave as a present to the Eskimo 
while we made use of most of the other. 

Our course in crossing Victoria Island from Simpson Bay, near 
the mouth of Forsyth Bay, was 310° Magnetic, so nearly as the for- 
mation of the land allowed. The elevation gets greater and greater 
constantly as one goes north until one gets within five or six miles 
of the shore of Prince Albert Sound, where there is an abrupt descent 
to sea level. 

We discovered on this crossing, which, by the way, is the first 
crossing by a white man of any part of Victoria Island, a good many 
natural features of importance which are best indicated on the map, 
while the geology is indicated in the appendix on that subject. There 
is a mountain range, the western end of which was seen first by Sir 
John Richardson's party in 1826 from across Dolphin and Union 
Straits, but which was nevertheless named by Rae in 1851 on his 
journey along the southwest coast. These mountains (the Colville 
' Tountains) come to an end in the low stretch where we crossed the 

d, but farther east again they rise to considerable height and one 



276 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

peak is especially conspicuous. As we did not discover any Eskimo 
name for it we called it Mount Bumpus, in honor of Dr. Herman C. 
Bumpus, director of the American Museum of Natural History, 
who had been the first man to take an active interest in the pro- 
motion of our expedition. 

We had had many opportunities to observe the migrations of 
caribou, but never a better one than now ; or perhaps a better way 
of putting it may be that the phenomenon had never impressed 
me so much. There were no tremendous herds such as those which 
had passed our camp in October of the previous year, which led me 
to speculate on the why and wherefore of the fundamental difference 
of that migration from this one. I can never for a long time remain 
of the same mind as to the reason for the almost unbelievable mass- 
ing of animals shown by such a herd as the Dease River one of 1910, 
described in a former chapter. If some one else were to advance 
the theory I am about to present, I should no doubt immediately see 
more than one way of demolishing it, but still we shall set it down 
here. 

It is a fact known to us through the statements of the Eskimo, 
as well as deducible on a priori grounds, that the caribou in Vic- 
toria Island begin to move south when the approach of autumn 
changes the conditions of the food. Many of them consequently 
reach the sea on the south side of the island before the ice is thick 
enough to afford them a bridge to the mainland. Accordingly they 
crowd up on the south shore waiting for the chance to cross, the 
numbers each day being augmented by the arrival of fresh bands from 
the north, whose feeding ground has been farther back on the island. 
Eventually, in case of a late fall, you would have all the caribou 
of the entire island massed in a few places, either where the feeding 
was good or where a point jutted out to the south. Then as soon 
as a night or two of hard frost bridges the sea over, the entire vast 
army moves across. 

The chief flaw in this argument is that the caribou that passed 
us in October did not seem to be, as a matter of fact, the same kind 
of caribou as those which we later killed on Victoria Island, but rather 
a larger variety and darker. The Victoria Island caribou seemed 
chiefly of the kind which we had killed in early April east of the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 277 

Coppermine. It is probable, therefore, that while our explanation 
really does explain the occurrence of certain herds that move south, 
it does not explain the origin of the particular herd which crossed the 
Dease in October, 1910. Some other causes may have brought 
them together in the land uninhabited either by Eskimo or Indian 
which lies between Coronation Gulf and Horton River. 

As we saw the migration now, it consisted of innumerable small 
bands. There were seldom less than three caribou and never more 
than forty. They were chiefly cows, but there were also young bulls 
and a few old ones, although I do not think the proportion of old bulls 
in Victoria Island in summer can be nearly as high as it is between 
Dismal Lake and Great Bear Lake, for the woods northeast of Bear 
Lake are literally full of them in summer. 

These bands seemed in general to be heading fifteen or twenty 
degrees more to the east than we were, and therefore grew fewer and 
fewer as we proceeded north diagonally across their line of march, 
for comparatively few caribou cross Dolphin and Union Straits west 
of Liston and Sutton Islands. They traveled with speed slightly 
less than ours (we were making about two and a half miles per hour) . 
They would occasionally feed for a few minutes and even lie down for 
an hour or two, but when they traveled they sometimes moved at 
a trot, although more commonly at a brisk walk. Sometimes they 
traveled in single file, especially in the rare places where the snow 
was deep ; often, if the band was large, they would travel in four or 
five columns. Animals that got our wind were considerably fright- 
ened thereby, but behaved with fair uniformity. When they winded 
us, they usually ran ahead in the direction in which they had been 
going. A few, however, turned back or ran off before the wind and 
some came up to inspect us, approaching to within two hundred 
yards in many cases and now and then to less than a hundred. 

The sight of the animals that came up from leeward and the smell 
of those traveling to windward kept our dogs continually excited, 
so that we made better progress than usual. At first the dogs were 
eager for a chance to pursue the caribou, but after a day or two 
^they became so used to the appearance of caribou near them that they 
Wentually got over their desire to break away from the sled and 
start out on a hunt of their own. 



\ 



278 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

The wind was usually easterly airs and we commonly traveled 
in the afternoon, so that unfortunately in the few instances when 
caribou came very near us they were directly towards the sun and 
therefore difficult to photograph. They were never much nearer 
than a hundred yards, and the few snapshots I took of them show 
up as pin points. My films were not too abundant, and our time was 
too precious to make any delays for a photograph of an animal 
which is so common as the caribou, and of which we had numer- 
ous properly taken scientific specimens (skins with antlers, bones, 
and measurements), which would be much more valuable than 
photographs. 

When the caribou travel in solid masses they do not mind a 
man at all, either the sight of him or the smell, but these bands were 
as wary as caribou ordinarily are. Nevertheless we found it quite 
safe not to bother with hauling any meat along with us. When it 
came time to pitch camp in the evening, one of us would put up the 
tent and do the cooldng (for which on this trip we used the primus 
stove and some kerosene given us by Captain Bernard), and the other 
would shoot a caribou and skin it. Then after supper we would 
fetch home to camp enough meat for the dogs and ourselves for the 
evening and the morning meal and carry with us only thirty or forty 
pounds, which would give us supper the following day, but nothing 
for breakfast the next morning should we fail to get caribou. This 
did not mean wasting much meat, for we had picked up an extra dog 
and now had a team of seven. Between the seven of them and the 
two of us we got away in two meals with a hundred pounds of meat, 
which is the larger part of a caribou. 

May 12th we reached Prince Albert Sound at a point where the 
charts show a conspicuous peninsula jutting out from the south shore 
just east of the middle of the sound. This, it turned out, is not a 
peninsula at all, but a long and narrow island known to the Eskimo 
as Walliraluk. For the last day or two caribou had not been so 
numerous — they were evidently heading more to the east of th^ 
sound. Accordingly we killed two, instead of the usual one, o' - 
of a band that came to Walliraluk Island that evening. The ' 
was no point in killing more than two, for we could not have hauk 
the meat. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 279 

From the top of the island the next morning I could with the 
glasses see a native village on the ice ten or fifteen miles to the north- 
west, approximately in the middle of Prince Albert Sound. When we 
approached it we saw this to be the largest village of our whole 
experience. It turned out that there were twenty-seven dwelling 
houses in it. We had, of course, seen the ruined trading village 
at Cape Bexley, which had over fifty dwellings, but these had been 
the houses of traders from half a dozen or more different tribes, 
while this turned out to be the one tribe of the Kanghirgyuargmiut, 
and they were not all at home either, for later on we visited an- 
other village of three houses of the same people, and a third village 
of four houses we never saw at all. 

Some of the other tribes visited had a special interest in that 
they had never before been seen by white men, either they or their 
ancestors; these had an interest of their own in being the one 
tribe which have oftener than others been visited by white men. 
It was the last of the tribes to be visited by us, and it was therefore 
especially interesting to me that we should come upon them on the 
13th of May, which was the anniversary of our discovery of the 
Cape Bexley Eskimo of the year before. 

When we approached the village and were about two miles south 
of it we came to a group of three men who had been sealing in dif- 
ferent places but who had converged and come to meet us. They 
were a little timid at first. They seemed to be surprised not so much 
by the fact that we were white men, for this they recognized at 
once, but by our coming from the southeast, from the country, as 
they said, where they knew of no one except their friends, the Puip- 
lirgmiut, who were now and then in the habit of arriving by the same 
route as ours, and at this season of the year, for purposes of trade. 
They were glad to see us, however, and assured us that we would be 
welcome in the village. 

When we got within about half a mile of the houses, our com- 
panions began to communicate with their fellows in the village by 
the use of one of the few examples of sign language in existence 
among these Eskimo. The signs consist in one member of an 
approaching party running a few yards to one side of the sled and 
stopping, and then running across the trail until he is as many 



280 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

yards on the^ other side and stopping again. This is repeated 
several times and signifies that friendly strangers are coming. 
This sort of signaHng, they told us, is never done by the strangers 
themselves, but always by local people who have joined the party of 
the strangers, just as these three people had joined ours. 

The sign was quickly understood in the village, which in its 
entirety came running to meet us, — men, women, children, and 
about half the dogs, while the other half that happened to be teth- 
ered howled loudly and plaintively. It was a crowd that I later 
estimated at considerably over two hundred. The village was large, 
and as each came from his own house and some were fleeter of foot 
than others, they did not come upon us in a crowd, but it was only 
a few minutes until we were completely surrounded so that further 
progress was impossible. Most if not all of them shouted, talked 
loudly, and ran holding their arms higher than their heads, opening 
and closing their hands continually to show they carried no weapon, 
and saying, "You need not be afraid of us," "We have no knives," 
"We are glad you have come," and things of that sort. 

We had been stopped too far away from the village to suit us, 
and after I had pointed this out to one man he jumped on top of 
our sled and shouted to the men to give us an opening so that we could 
get nearer to the village and have a chance to pitch camp. This 
was done with the greatest good will, but our dogs were so excited 
that they refused to pull, upon which some one suggested that we 
unhitch them, for there were plenty of people around for pulling our 
sled. The dogs were accordingly unhitched and used their first 
opportunity to get into fights with the local dogs, adding their growls 
and snarls to the shouting and cheering of the people as they tumul- 
tuously pushed and hauled our sled up to the village. 

This was perhaps the most vociferous welcome we had ever 
received. What with dogs barking and howling and people laugh- 
ing and talking it was difficult to make oneself understood. We 
were immediately asked whether we desired to put up a snow-house, 
in which case they offered to build one for us ; but we had our own 
tent and the season of the year had now come when a tent is pref- 
erable to a snow-house. So we preferred to pitch it as we ordinarily 
did. Some of the dwellings of the people themselves were still of 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 281 

snow, but most of them had had the snow roofs replaced by ones 
of caribou skins, and a few families were living in caribou skin 
tents. 

One of the first things we learned here was something which 
changed our plans for the summer completely. We were told that 
there were no people on Banks Island in summer. Our informants 
themselves, they said, had spent the winter there at various points 
on the southeast coast between what we identified as De Salis 
Bay and Nelson Head, and were the only people who did live any- 
where on Banks Island. They had all left there in what we under- 
stood to be the latter part of March, and were now bound for the 
eastward. The majority intended to ascend the River Kagloryuak, 
which flows into the east end of Prince Albert Sound, and rises near 
the center of the island. Another river, they told us, the Ekalluk- 
tok, also rises near the center of the island, but flows east into what 
we identified as Albert Edward Bay. Up this river would come to 
meet them the tribe of the Ekalluktogmiut, who hunt on Dease 
Strait in winter, but who frequent the same caribou hunting-grounds 
in summer as do the Prince Albert Sound people, partly on account 
of the caribou, but also for trading purposes. 

These were the people whom Lieutenant Gotfred Hansen of 
Amundsen's expedition found in Dease Strait on his journey to Vic- 
toria Island and whom he misidentified as the Coppermine River 
Eskimo. His account of how he identified them as the Coppermine 
River people is naive and deserves quoting : — 

" When we came up to each other he (one of the Eskimo) said 
something about * Kilnermiun Innuit,' the name of his tribe. I un- 
derstood that, because I already knew the name, and I replied 
that we were 'Kabluna,' or white men. Then we embraced and 
rubbed our cheeks together. When you are in Rome you must 
do as Rome does. He was my friend for the two days that we 
remained there, and during that time he certainly thought I under- 
stood everything he said, merely because I had said that we were 
' Kabluna ' when he mentioned the name of his race, but of course I 
did not understand a word. As our Norwegian-Eskimo language was 
of no use to us, we could not get any information about the land 
further ahead, and any conversation which had a definite object had 



I 



282 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

to be carried on by signs." (The North West Passage, Vol. 2, p. 
327. London, 1908.) 

It is true, as Lieutenant Hansen says, that there are people not | 
very far from the Coppermine who are called the Killinermiut. That 
fact prompts a digression. Central northwest Alaska was occupied 
by numerous tribes, perhaps the smallest and least significant of all 
of which are the Nunatagmiut. Northwest of them live the Otur- 
kagmiut, south of them live the Noatagmiut, east of them Hve the 
Ka'ngianergmiut — all of these far more important tribes and larger 
than the Nunatagmiut. But for some reason the name " Nunatag- 
miut" was appHed by various distant peoples to all the country oc- 
cupied by all the above-named and numerous other tribes. The way 
it seems to have happened is this : If you approach from the south 
or the southwest at Kotzebue Sound and ask any one, "Who are 
the people that live northeast from you?" the answer would be: 
"First come the Kuvugmiut, then come the Napaktogmiut, then 
the Noatamiut and beyond them live the Nunatagmiut" In other 
words the people of Kotzebue Sound knew these tribes, and the last 
tribe they knew was the Nunatagmiut, and they knew the names 
of none beyond, so that approaching from the southwest the infor- 
mation always ended by saying "Beyond them live the Nunatagmiut." 
Similarly should you come to the mouth of the Colville River and ask, 
"Who are the tribes that live southwest from you?" the answer 
would be, "First come the Killirgmiut, then the Kagmallirgmiut, 
then the Kangianergmiut, and beijond them live the NunatagmiuV 
In the Colville River you would hear nothing about the tribes which 
had been enumerated to you at Kotzebue Sound, for they are not so 
well known to the Colville people, and their information would end 
with the phrase, "beyond them live the Nunatagmiut," because 
they occupy the divide of land and on the other side of the divide 
everything was mysterious. The general result was that the impres- 
sion gained ground along the sea-coast that all the people who occu- 
pied the interior were called Nunatagmiut, although it is a matter of 
fact that when you once penetrate the interior, while you find some 
real Nunatagmiut you find that they are few compared to the mul- 
titude who are not Nunatagmiut. The whole interior population of 
Alaska thus became known to the coast people by the name not 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 283 

of the most important inland tribe, but by that of the most distant. 
So it seems to have been in Coronation Gulf. The people who hunt 
on the south coast of Victoria Island, east of Lady Franklin Point, 
the Killinermiut (called also, and most commonly, Nagyuktogmiut), 
are as a matter of fact known in folk-lore and song to the Macken- 
zie River Eskimo, and they seem to have been similarly known to 
Amundsen's King William Island Eskimo, while the names of all 
the other equally large or larger tribes are unknown. 

Now the Ekalluktogmiut, whom Lieutenant Hansen saw, live so far 
east from the Coppermine that in all probability all the tribes more 
than a hundred miles west of them, or in other words all the tribes 
between Kent Peninsula and the Coppermine, would by them be 
grouped under one name. It is not conceivable that any tribe 
except the Killinermiut proper would have designated themselves 
as Killinermiut, but it is also unlikely that the Ekalluktogmiut 
would introduce themselves as Ekalluktogmiut. The Ekalluktog- 
miut would be far more likely to inquire about the Killinermiut, as 
the Killinermiut might about the Ekalluktogmiut. Any one familiar 
with Eskimo customs will know that it is the last thing that an 
Eskimo is likely to do to repeat the name of his own tribe. He is 
much more likely to volunteer unasked the information that such 
and such a tribe lives next beyond him, or to ask of the stranger, " Do 
you belong to Such-and-such a tribe ? " or, " Have you been visiting 
that tribe ? " After all, that is our own way. We seldom have occa- 
sion, if we are stay-at-homes, unless we happen to live in tourist 
centers, to explain to any one our own nationality, while the nation- 
ality of every foreigner who comes within our sphere of observation is 
a matter of interest and is continually on the tip of our tongue. That 
the man to whom Lieutenant Hansen listened pronounced the name 
of Killinermiut, among a thousand other non-understandable words 
which he also pronounced, cannot be looked upon as proving that he 
was a Killinermiut or that he had any intention of saying that he was. 
More likely he was giving Lieutenant Hansen information about a 
distant tribe or inquiring of him as to his knowledge of that tribe. 

Perhaps this has been a rather complicated and lengthy digres- 
sion, but it seems justified as a needed explanation of why it is that 
ethnologists and others are so prone to call a primitive people by a 



284 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

name to which those people themselves are entirely unwilling to 
subscribe, and also as explaining how it was that Lieutenant Hansen 
when among the Ekalluktogmiut of Albert Edward Bay thought 
he was among the Coppermine Eskimo. 

One of the first things I did at the village of the Prince Albert 
Sound people was to inquire about their knowledge of white men. 
This group is not only the most prosperous as well as the most numer- 
ous of all the Copper Eskimo, but they are also remarkable for the 
extent of their seasonal migrations and for their consequently greater 
amount of information in regard to their own country and other 
countries and their general broad-mindedness. With them as with 
us, extensive travels have had their important effect upon the mental 
outlook and the character of the people. I found therefore that 
they were familiar not only with the presence of the exploring vessels 
to the west of their country during the time of the Franklin Search, 
and with the location of the Bay of Mercy and the abandonment of 
M'Clure's ship there, but they also knew about King William Island 
far to the east, and about the frequent visits of white men to it, and 
they even had information about the distant island of North Devon, 
as we could tell not only by the geographic description they gave of 
the country, but also by their reporting correctly the name of the 
people who inhabit it, the Tununirohirmiut, which is also the name 
recorded by Dr. Franz Boas and others from information gathered 
in Baffin Land and elsewhere in the east. 

But most remarkable of all was the variety of countries they had 
seen with their own eyes. During the middle of winter they occupy 
the southeastern coast of Banks Island from De Salis Bay to Nelson 
Head, and it has always been so in the past so far as they know. 
About March each year they start east, and towards the middle of 
May, as we could tell from our present experience, they get to the 
eastern end of Prince Albert Sound. On the Sound they split into 
various parties. A few go north to hunt, between the Sound and 
Minto Inlet; in some years a few go south to meet the Eskimo of 
Point Williams, halfway between the Sound and Dolphin and Union 
Straits. A considerable number go southeast to meet the people 
of Simpson Bay (the Puiplirgmiut), and a considerable number also 
go northeast from the northeast corner of the Sound about forty 




HiTKOAK. 



Alunak. 



Pamiungittok. 




A Coronation Gulf Family. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 285 

miles to hunt caribou and to get, from the copper outcrops there, 
material for the making of implements for their own use and for sale 
to other tribes. The largest body of all goes east, as we have already- 
said, to meet the people of Albert Edward Bay (the Ekalluktogmiut) 
near the center of Victoria Island. But most years two or three 
sleds will detach themselves from the main body in Prince Albert 
Sound, hurry east ahead of the others up the Kagloryuak River and 
down the Ekalluktok River to Albert Edward Bay, and thence south 
across the Straits to the Ahiagmiut, who inhabit the coast in the 
neighborhood of Ogden Bay, where they abandon their sleds, for 
summer has overtaken them, and proceed south with pack-dogs, 
the people themselves also carrying packs, until they reach the 
shores of Back River, where the Back River people, known to them 
as the Haningayogmiut, make rafts of their kayaks and ferry them to 
the south shore of the stream. Resuming their overland travel, they 
eventually reach Hanbury's Arkilinik River in its wooded section, 
probably early in August. The chief object of this journey has been 
to get wood and wooden articles of all kinds, which they obtain partly 
by cutting the trees and shaping the wood to their own desires, and 
partly by barter in exchange for copper implements and such things 
from the Eskimo of the Arkilinik, whom they call the Pallirgmiut. 

Once only, they told me, had two or three families of their people 
seen white men on the Arkilinik, and their description of the 
party made clear that it was Hanbury's in 1903, for their 
account coincides quite with his. Further, they knew the names 
of all of the members of Hanbury's party, and although those of the 
three white men were not recognizable, the names of those Eskimo 
whom Hanbury names as his companions are identical in his book and 
in the account given by the Victoria Islanders. They name also 
several Eskimo whom Hanbury does not name (for Hanbury 
nowhere gives the entire roll of his party), including Panningaiyak, 
the daughter of Atangalak (whom Hanbury calls Utungerlah and 
whom Amundsen speaks of as Atangala). There was only one man 
in Prince Albert Sound (named Hitkoak) when we were there of 
those who had seen Hanbury. The others, he said, had some of them 
died since and some were now living among other tribes. 




CHAPTER XVIII 

"E stayed three days in this, the largest village of the Copper 
Eskimo. On account of the number of individuals 
gathered together, their social life tended a little more to 
complexity than was the case in any of the other districts, but still 
it can hardly be said that there was a semblance of government. 
Certain individuals appeared, however, to have a preponderating in- 
fluence, based apparently on individual prowess and to some extent 
on their records as travelers. The men who had been down in the 
vicinity of Chesterfield Inlet, and who had visited numerous tribes 
other than those with which the tribe as a whole comes in contact, 
were apparently looked up to for that reason. 

One of the more prominent men was named Kitirkolak. He gave 
me varied information about distant sections of Victoria Island, but 
told me that if I wanted to be really well informed I must visit his 
father, Pamiungittok, who lived in the next village to the westward 
and who was the only man now living of those who had seen Collin- 
son in Walker Bay (1852). Kitirkolak volunteered to guide us to 
his father's village, and on the evening of May 15th he accompanied 
us west along the trail by which the party had come from Banks 
Island. In sixteen or so miles of travel we came to a village of the 
twenty -seven deserted snow-houses which had up to a week before 
accommodated the party we had just left. At the outskirts of the 
village were three houses still occupied by Pamiungittok, his son, 
Alunak, and his son-in-law, Hitkoak, with their families. 

Before leaving the large village we had purchased a complete 
ethnological collection of hunting implements, clothing, cooking 
gear, and household utensils, with all of which our sled was now 
heavily loaded for its journey to our base at Langton Bay. We 
therefore added at this last village practically nothing to our material 
collection (for we could carry no more), but we did add considerably 

286 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 287 

i to our stock of information, for Pamiungittok knew many things and 

I was ready to tell all he knew. Perhaps I could make a clearer sum- 

j mary by re -writing the information secured from him, but it seems 

j possible that the reader may be interested to see the way in which I 

made hasty note of the new information given me at this village. 

I will therefore set down here a few pages from my diary without 

editing, but merely adding in brackets what appears necessary to 

, make the meaning intelligible. Matter inclosed in ordinary paren- 

' thesis marks is as it appears in the diary. 

There are two reasons for the brevity and fragmentary character 
of my diary entries at this period : one that time was always scarce, 
and the other that writing-paper was even scarcer than time; for 
the one diary book in which all my entries had to be made was so 
nearly run to its close that everything had to be written in an almost 
microscopic hand, in many cases over fifteen hundred words to a page 
of eight inches by nine. 

Tuesday, May 16. [Taking] cephalic measurements, etc. Cari- 
bou are crossing here [going] north but not in such numbers as farther 
east. This village — three tents [standing at one edge of a deserted 
snowhouse village] which once housed the whole tribe. [This village] 
seems about in the middle of the Sound from north to south (but 
farther west than middle probably?). Two families of the tribe 
seem to have hunted bears on the point south of the Sound [Cape 
Baring] but the rest [were in] Banks Island last winter. Those in 
Banks Island found no whale [carcasses] "this year" [which implies 
hey usually find them], but those on Cape Baring found one with the 
leat mostly gone but the head bone [baleen] still there — the bears 
lad eaten all the meat. When the wind blows either east or west 
there is] open water at Nelson Head and off southwest Victoria 
sland as well. 

Paviiungittok tells: He was about 8 years old when [in 1852] 

e visited Collinson's ship [in Walker Bay] with his father. The 

vvhite men were excellent people and paid well for water boots, etc. 

'hey threw away much valuable stuff which the people picked up. 

At that time there were numerous people beyond [north of] Minto 

Inlet. He has never heard more than one name for these people — 



288 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Ugyugligmiut. He has heard that they attacked a ship (what ship ?) 
and killed some white men. The white men then shot them down 
with guns and killed the last one. This he has heard ; what he knows 
is that there are no people now beyond Minto Inlet — they are all 
dead, for one reason or another. Of the Minto Inlet people (Kan- 
hiryuatjiagmiut or Naperagvigmiut) there are now only four families, 
though they were once numerous, and one of these four families is 
really a Prince Albert Sound family moved over [to Minto Inlet]. 

There were numerous people once resident in Banks Island sum- 
mers, and on the ice near it winters. These are all dead — some of 
hunger in (or near) Banks Island and the last party on the ice of the 
mouth of Prince Albert Sound — these last died "because they had 
no food for their stomachs and because they had no oil [for fuel] to 
make water with." There are many stone houses here and there, 
chiefly between the Sound and Minto Inlet. These were not built 
by "the forefathers of our countrymen," but by the turnnrat [spirits] 
long ago. 

The Prince Albert Sound people never heard from the Ekalluk- 
togmiut whom they see most summers, of ships being lost [Franklin's] 
or of white men starving on the east coast of Victoria Island. (Pa- 
miungittok's son, Kitirkulak, will make inquiries for me next summer 
of the Ekalluktogmiut [with regard to the loss of Franklin's ships].) 
He has never heard of any white men having Eskimo wives [or living 
in any part of Victoria Island — this question I asked with reference 
to the blond traits of many members of this tribe]. It is "in the 
nature of Eskimo to have light hair and blue eyes " [he told me, 
and all his countrymen agreed with him]. 

Range of the Kanghirgyuargmiut. In summer some of them (a 
few) hunt towards Minto Inlet ; some hunt southeast and meet the '■ 
Puiblirgmiut ; most, however, hunt east and meet the Ekallugtogmiut ' 
and Ashiagmiut who live "on the east coast of our country, which is 
not far from here overland, and good sledding because we go by the; 
rivers." Some join the Ekallugtogmiut for a time and with them! 
visit the Arkilinik [near Baker Lake above the head of Chesterfield^ 
Inlet] "where there are trees, and where the people have guns and" 
white men's clothes." (Have seen many metal articles, one shirt, ^' 
one red knit woollen hood, etc., brought from these trips.) They' 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 289 

never met the Nagyuktogmiut. One man at least — Hitkoak — 
has been both to the AkiHnik and to Umingmuktok. 

In the fall they [the Kanghirgyuargmiutl come to Prince Albert 
Sound and proceed to Banks Island where in winter they live chiefly 
on bears (some entirely; others partly on seals) off Nelson Head 
and east of it. When bear hunting they often see Cape Parry [on 
the mainland to the south]. Nelson Head can be seen from Parry 
only from the hill tops, and that rarely, and it is much higher than 
Parry, so they must hunt almost to the middle of the strait. 

They usually have houses on or by the shore when in Banks Is- 
land. They often see caribou but "do not know how to hunt them 
in winter." They know there are musk-oxen inland but they do not 
go after them. In spring they return to the Sound and soon scatter 
to the various hunting places. Those going to the Ekallugtogmiut 
are already on the way (intended starting the day after we came to 
the village and delayed for us). Those going north towards Minto 
do not leave the sea till "the snow gets soft on the ice." 

Wednesday, May 17. Have given up going farther in direction of 
Banks Island, as there are no people that way. Started 3 : 30 p.m. 
heading for Cape Back about true southwest. Camped 7: 30 p.m. 
to get chance to write up some of my briefer notes before the fillings-in 
are forgotten or misremembered. 

Game. No seals seen on top the ice — ugrug (bearded seals) are 
to be expected nearer land and seals are not up yet. Crossed about 
400 or 500 caribou tracks, f of them over a week old. Migration 
seems over, or at least there is a lull. Saw three bands of eight, seven, 
and three. The latter two Natkusiak tried but got shot at last only 
— three misses on the run at 200 yards. Ptarmigan seen every day, 
mostly (or all?) rock ptarmigan. Crows every day. No snow- 
buntings since leaving Walliraluk. Dist.[ance traveled] 12 [miles]. 

Pamiungittok tells : The Banks Island people used to be well off. 
They killed so many deer and [musk] oxen that their dried meat 
sometimes lasted the year round. They got to killing each other. 
One man killed had relatives in the Sound. For this reason {i.e. 
because of witchcraft practised by the dead man' s relatives in the 
Sound) food became scarce [in Banks Island] ; there were no seals 
for food or fuel and the people died of hunger — those that had not 



290 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

been murdered in the feuds. This happened some fifteen years ago 
— i.e. when Agleroittok [who is now about twenty-five] was a boy but 
[after] his two brothers [were] grown up. 

Population. In the village first visited (May 13) there were 27 
dwellings. These were on the average much larger than among other 
groups (because skins are more plentiful ?) . In one house there 
were 9 persons and this was probably not the largest number. There 
were 41 married women — none single — as I found out in giving 
one needle to each tattooed woman. I was told there were many un- 
married men, and children seemed numerous. This village therefore 
had over 150 persons. That of May 16 had 11. There are 4 houses 
that we did not see — that have moved to shore about north of the 
May 16 village. Estimate these at 15. This gives 176 for Prince 
Albert Sound group [as a minimum estimate — the true number is 
probably higher.] There are four families in Minto Inlet, or about 
fifteen to twenty more ; [there are therefore] about 195 or 200 [people] 
north of Cape Baring. The Ekalluktogmiut are about the same 
number as the Prince Albert Sound people. There are said to be 
the Tununirohirmiut north or northeast ( ?) of the Ekalluktogmiut. 
{Turnunirohirmiugoh nunam turnuani inmata).^ I could get no 
idea of how many they are; my informants are not even sure that 
they are on Victoria Island. These are said to have no bows and to 
dress only in seal. (They may be a fabulous people though I think 
not.) Besides these groups there are the people from the Nagyuk- 
togmiut east, for whom I have no data. The west coast north of 
Minto Inlet and the north coast where the same [Prince Albert 
Sound] people sometimes reach it (Collinson Inlet ?) are said unin- 
habited. This sea to the north is said not to thaw all summer, but 
the coast has caribou and there are seals on the ice. People some- 
times reach it by sledding through rough country, "but when the 
snow is hard yet" in a generally northern direction from the foot of 
Prince Albert Sound. 

Shamanism. May 15 we missed our primus stove "needle" — 

1 Translation : They are called " the People of the Back Side " (of the land) 
because they are at the far end of (their) land (from the point of view of the 
rest of the people). In other words: "People of the End of the Earth.'' 
The name probably refers to the north end of Prince of Wales Island. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 291 

it may have been taken by someone or it may have got lost. A 
woman angatkuk [shaman], I-ku-tok [by name], offered to get it for 
us (by witchcraft) if I paid for the performance. This I refused to 
do unless it were a success — in which event I would give her a small 
file. That suited her, and the performance began. As Natkusiak 
understands them [the shamanistic performances] somewhat better 
than I, it was arranged he should act in my part and "say yes" for 
me. There were about 15 persons in our tent and 50 or 60 outside 
listening. The woman got a free floor space about 1^ by 3 feet in 
the middle of the tent, where she stood up. She began at first quietly, 
saying in an ordinary tone and manner that she would first look for 
the lost articles "apkuota"^ — the "road/' I suppose, by which it 
was taken away when stolen. Where was it when it was stolen ? 
In that box ? Where was the box ? In what part of the box was 
it ? Was she to find the thief ? Was she to get her spirit to find the 
"road" of the thief? (to 19 out of 20 at least of her questions the 
answer was "yes"). 

Most of her questions [the shaman] asked of me, but some she 
asked of others. Not only the person asked but half a dozen others 
would answer "yes" in chorus, or else [they answered] by other 
affirmatives and urgings to "go on," "describe the thief," etc. 

Gradually [the shaman] became more excited and little by little 
she narrowed her eyes till they were finally held closely shut. Then 
of a sudden she changed her tone of voice, evidently now trying to 
imitate an old man both by tone of speech and by hoarse laughing. 
She now announced that she was so-and-so (the name escaped me 
— it was no doubt the name of the spirit that now possessed her). 
" Ha, I see the road ! It did not go out by the tent door ; it went 
out by that corner of the tent ! (As a matter of fact, our visitors used 
to come and go under any but the back side of our tent.) She goes 
to the village ! It is not a man ; it is a woman. She has hidden the 
needle in her boot. She has on a pair of 'fancy' boots." (Here 
followed a detailed description of [the thief's] costume, but as most 
women dress alike, no one could recognize the description.) 

[The listeners now commenced asking eager questions of the 
shaman.] "Tell us, is she old or young? Is she a big woman?" 
1 Apkuota = its path ; thoroughfare or channel by which it traveled. 



292 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

etc. [But the sorceress kept on as if she did not hear.] "Oh, now I 
cannot see clearly; there is a fog coming over me. But I see one 
thing. She goes to a house a little east of the middle of the village. 
([The audience:] 'Which house? which house?') The house has 
snow walls and a tent roof (nine-tenths of all the houses had) — it 
has a peaked tent roof (three-fourths of the houses had) (audience : 
'What sort of gear is outside the house ? Tell us and we will recog- 
nize the house'). There is a bag full of clothes (every house had 
one or more). There is a seal spear; there are two seal spears (a 
common number — most houses had two families). I cannot see 
more, the fog darkens. (Here she became more quiet. After being 
possessed by the spirit she spoke in hoarse shrieks. By now she was 
out of breath and tired.) I am now myself again, I am now no 
longer so-and-so." 

Of a sudden the shaman staggered as if to fall backwards, then 
regained herself and began to mutter rapidly and not harshly. It 
was now said she was possessed by a Kablunak {turnnrak)} There 
were apparently no real words in this muttering {i.e. no Eskimo or 
any other speech), but it was said she was now speaking Kablunat 
(white men's) language. There were constant repetitions of -a-tji, 
-la-tji, -ta-tji, etc., reminding one strongly of Athabascan Indian 
speech, and almost exactly like our Tannaumirk's alleged imitations 
of Loucheux talk. 

When all was done (about ten minutes of mutterings), the woman 
announced that the thief had left the village. She then assumed her 
natural voice and the performance was over. As two or three families 
had left that morning, starting east towards the bottom of the Sound, 
it was concluded one of the women [of those families] was the thief. 
A man offered to go get the needle [from them]. No one seemed to 
doubt he would get it. I offered the man the file if he would go, as 
the woman acknowledged she had failed to get the needle for me. 
She was, however, to get some pay also if the man succeeded. The 
man was gone about six hours, and came back unsuccessful. With 
him came back the whole suspected party, apparently to assert their 
innocence. 

A man angatkuk now offered to try. His performance consisted 
1 Kablunak = white man, European ; turn-nrak = spirit. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 293 

in "ceremonially'^ removing from the primus stove box every article 
it contained except the (glass) alcohol bottle. This he feared, and 
I had to take it out for him. Fearing this was considered by the rest 
to be a sign of great wisdom. None of them had known enough to 
fear it and several had touched it [for it had looked harmless to them 
and it was only the supernatural wisdom of the Great Shaman that 
saw the insidious peril of this transparent thing that looked like ice 
but wasn't]. He then stuck his head into the box and kept it there 
three or four minutes, lifting and setting down the top several times 
meanwhile (his head all the time in the box) . He finally emerged and 
announced he could not see the road by which the needle went. He 
said he had not been looking for the thief, merely for the "road" of 
the needle. 

General [Comment]. The Sound people are evidently the most 
prosperous Eskimo we have seen; they are the most "travelled" 
and the best informed about their own country (Victoria Island) and 
its surroundings. While they have been to the Bay of Mercy on 
north Banks Island and west beyond Nelson Head on south Banks 
Island they do not seem any of them to have been across the [Dol- 
phin and Union] straits to the Akuliakattak summer hunting grounds 
[near Cape Bexley on the mainland], or to the sea anywhere on 
south Victoria Island except among the Haneragmiut and Puiblir- 
miut. Those who have been to a little west of Uminmuktok have 
come from the east to it as visitors of the Ahiagmiut in most cases 
(Hanbury's Arctic Coast Huskies?). Hitkoak, about the most trav- 
elled of any, has been at the Bay of Mercy, well west of Nelson 
Head, to Uminmuktok and into Bathurst Inlet, and to the Arkilinik 
[near Chesterfield Inlet]. He looks not over thirty-five. He says 
he has ceased travelling, for he has seen "many places and none are 
so good as the [Prince Albert] Sound country." He told us that he 
and some other families with him killed not a single seal last winter 
— lived on polar bears alone. They got seal oil to burn from others 
in trade for bear fat and meat. Honesty seems on a higher level 
among them than among any other people we have seen except the 
Akuliakattagmiut and Haneragmiut. Their clothes are far the best, 
their tents the largest. They use far more copper than any other 
people — doubtless because it is more abundant [in their country]. 



294 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

The Kogluktogmiut [of the Coppermine River] are very eager for 
metal rods for the middle piece of the seal spear. They never make 
any of copper, no doubt because copper is too scarce. Their ice picks 
are small : their seal hole feelers are all of horn or iron. In the 
Sound [on the other hand] the copper ice picks are in some cases three- 
quarters by one and a quarter inch and fifteen inches long. Most 
seal spears have middle pieces of copper — the rest have iron [from 
JVI'Clure's ship ?]. The seal hole feelers are most [of them] of copper. 
Some of their tent sticks are of local driftwood, some are round young 
spruce which they get from the Puiblirmiut who get them from our 
neighbors of last August. Some sleds come from Dease River; 
some from Cape Bexley, but in either case they have been bought of 
the Puiplirgmiut or the Haneragmiut. Their stone pots are said to 
be all from the Utkusiksialik or Kogluktualuk (Tree River). Some 
they got from the Puiplirgmiut by the road Natkusiak and I came 
last week, some around the point [Cape Baring] from the Hanerag- 
miut by the road we are taking now. Their fire stones [iron pyrite 
for striking fire] are some from the Haneragmiut, some picked up in 
the mountains north of the Sound. The copper is all from the 
mountains northeast of the bottom of the Sound. They say some 
[detached] pieces of pure copper [in those mountains] are as high as 
a man's shoulder and as wide as high ; others project out of the hill- 
side and are of unknown size. East of Prince Albert Sound [on the 
Kagloryuak River] they use willows chiefly for fuel in summer — 
these are four to five feet high in places. Heather [for fuel] is also 
abundant. The musk oxen are confined to the unpeopled sections of 
north and northeast Victoria Island and to Banks Island. They 
think there are a few deer in north Victoria Island in winter but none 
in soutli Victoria Island. The charms that starved the Banks Is- 
land people [see above] deprived that country (sea and land both) of 
food animals for a time, but these have gradually increased and are 
now numerous — Banks Island has again become a good country. 
Nevertheless people never hunt there summers. There is plenty 
driftwood ajohg the south shore of Prince Albert Sound, some along 
the north shore. There is plenty [drift]wood northwest of Nelson 
Head [Banks Island] and considerably east of it, but it is hard to 
find in winter. There are plenty of macu roots [polygonum biston- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 295 

turn] ^ on the Peninsula between the Sound and Minto [Inlet] — and 
elsewhere. People eat plenty of them. Many good fishing places 
here and there, but they do not live to nearly such an extent on fish 
as do the Ekalluktogmiut, who eat fish all winter, as well as seal. 

Superstition. "Superstition" is perhaps more in evidence here 
than anywhere else. At the large village I could get no single individual 
to be photographed. An attempt to get a sample of " auburn " hair was 
futile and caused much [unfavorable] comment and suspicion. I tried 
first to trade some of my hair for it [a sample of the hair of a European- 
looking Eskimo], then to buy it. There were continual requests that I 
should next summer "think away" sickness from them and "think 
them" plenty game and good fortune. There have been requests of 
this sort at all villages, but nowhere so serious, insistent and often re- 
peated. Pamiungittok gave me a pair of breeches and an arrow to 
make me "think good" for his son who was sick — Agleroittok [is his 
name]. He asked repeatedly that I give him nothing in return, for he 
feared if I paid for the breeches I would not "think good " for his son. 
The blind man, Avranna, in Clouston Bay (there is also a blind man 
at Prince Albert village — old man — about 60) told us the reason 
of his blindness was that he had killed a large ugrug and when the 
people came wanting to cut it up he grudged to let them help them- 
selves, therefore he became blind. I could not make out if the grudg- 
ing' of itself caused the blindness, or if some "doctor" [shaman] was 
angered by it and made him blind — I believe the former. Nat- 
kusiak says it is no doubt true, for he knows of parallel cases in his 
own country. Usually there, however, it was this way : some one 
committed a bad deed (grudged to give something, stole, etc.) in 
secret. The "doctor" would then so ordain "magically" that the 
guilty person would in some way suffer — then not only was the guilt 
punished but also people found out who was guilty (e.g. if an article 
had been stolen). 

At the first Nagyuktogmiut village in April some noise was heard 
outside our snowhouse. Our visitors of the time decided it was our 

1 These roots form on the mainland the chief food of the marmot and the 
grizzly bear, both of which are absent from Victoria Island. All Eskimo 
known to me use this root as food ^ the Alaskans extensively, but the Vic- 
torians to a negligible extent only. 



296 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

(or my) turnnrak [familiar spirit] and forthwith started a chorus of 
requests and prayers to me {not to the turnnrak) to have the turnnrak 
provide plenty seals, good weather, good health, the safe birth of 
expected children, etc. As we were leaving there was a concerted 
request by all present that we intercede with the turnnrak for two 
women, Arnauyak and Anaktok (both young, though only Anaktok 
recently married — other two or three years) that they might have 
children born to them. At last village (May 16) I staid over a day 
to see if a few lead and opium pills would do Agleroittok any good 
■ — he had had chronic diarrhoea since the summer 1908. They 
did seem to do good, but they were not satisfied with that — I must 
"pat" his stomach before going. Hitkoak made for me and bound 
on me a charm sash (usual type) so that I should remember and 
"keep thinking that his wife should have safe delivery of a healthy 
child" — event about a month distant. 

Natkusiak says the angatkuk performances are very different here 
from [those among] his people — he does not seem to think Victoria 
people are very powerful angatkuk [shamans] but has firm faith in all 
the claims of his own people's angatkuk. 

The woman's performance [described above] was very similar to 
that of Ovayuak [a Mackenzie River shaman] in January, 1907. The 
Sound people would not do cats' cradles for me because it is now in the 
long days — they play them only when sun is away — cf. Akulia- 
kattagmiut as well as Ilavinirk's account of [cat's cradle customs in] 
Kotzebue Sound. 

Natkusiak tells : Some or all children are turnnrak [spirits] before 
birth, A few people can remember the things they knew when they 
were (prenatally) turnnrak. These are powerful angatkuk and can tell 
people many things they must not do {i.e., [these shamans] impose 
taboos). He has known one such man. He came as a turnnrak 
along the coast from the east and north, following every curve of the 
coast. Like other turnnrak of his class he was looking for a mother 
through whom to be born. He found her at Prince of Wales. The 
man when he grew up could tell many wonderful things that he knew 
before incarnation. Among other things, he told that the reason 
people don't see these turnnrak that are looking for mothers is that 
they iglaurut tautugnaittuagun (literally : travel through, or by. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 297 

unseen regions). Natkusiak does not know just how this is — he 
has merely heard the expression. "Perhaps it means they travel 
underground," he says. He learnt in Prince Albert Sound [that there 
are there] some men who remember their prenatal existence. 

Friday, May 19. Started 3 : 30 p.m. and camped 10 : 30 p.m. 
Dist. 20 miles. The ice is a little rough on getting near shore and 
[there are] a few cakes of ground ice on shore. At camp all looks 
smooth to north and northeast as seen from fifty foot elevation, but 
rougher [ice] ahead of us. Our camp is at the farthest point that has 
ever been visible to us — ^ a cape at about a 20° angle of the 
coast. Numerous small fragments of wood [seen along the beach; 
they are] good [because they have been kept from decay by lying 
on a rocky beach. Driftwood decays quickly on sandy beaches]. 

The land so far as I have made out everywhere west of Walliraluk 
Island rises abruptly from the beach line (in less than a mile) to a 
height of 300 or 400 feet. There are plenty ravines but these do not 
give a serrated appearance to the skyline, which is about as even here 
as it is in the Melvill Mountains in Franklin Bay. Near Walliraluk, 
as near Langton Bay, there is a strip of 3 or 4 mile width of hilly low- 
land between sea and mountains. The rock in situ at camp (no solid 
edges exposed, but flat chipped rock of all sizes and of one kind 
chiefly) is the same as Walliraluk Island [of which we took specimens 
— limestone]. East of Walliraluk lowland widens and the foot of the 
Sound is everywhere low. This lowness extends across the entire 
island [from Prince Albert Sound to Albert Edward Bay], I under- 
stand, for it is all river valleys (the Kagloryuak and the Ekalluktok) . 
The [Wollaston] peninsula (the people say, and it looks so too) is not 
practicable for crossing by sled anywhere except near where we 
crossed it. In communicating with the Haneragmiut winters they 
[the Sound people] always go west around the point [Cape Baring]. 

Caribou tracks as numerous as ever but mostly old. The height 
of the migration here was probably the first week of May. Tracks 
all [heading] between north and northwest true. Plenty fox tracks, 
one wolf [track]. No bear [polar] signs yet. A wolverine was shot 
(bow and arrow) on the ice of the sound (somewhere west of where we 
found people the other day) in the spring a year ago. I got both the 
skin and the phalanges bones, etc., from the man who shot it. [This 



298 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

wolverine probably became lost ; otherwise it seems unlikely a forest 
animal would go a hundred miles north of the true line.] 

Saturday, May 20th. Started 1 : 10. Camped midnight. Dist. 
25 miles. The ice became rough inshore after travelling about ten 
miles to-day. At one time we lost three-quarters of hour maldng 
with axes a road to get inshore of a 40 yd. strip of broken ice. [Seen] 
from a 50 ft. elevation [on shore] it seemed that outside of a half-mile 
belt along shore the ice is fairly smooth north across the sound, though 
here and there small strips rough ice [appear]. [There was a] snow 
haze however so we could not see far. From ''land sky" ^ ahead it 
seems we are nearing Cape Baring — the land sky curves south a 
little west of us. Tide cracks very numerous along shore. May 18th 
we crossed two tide cracks about four miles apart running perpen- 
dicular to the land, or north and south. These were about three feet 
[wide] and showed no pressure ice — looked like new cracks. Just 
east of Cape Back we crossed the third similar crack. 

[Drift]wood everywhere when we approach close enough to see, 
but small pieces only. Have not seen one as large as four feet long. 
At camp the largest piece we found would go well in a kitchen stove. 
There is in sight perhaps a cord of wood for say 3 or 4 miles of beach, 
but no doubt the snow hides f of what there is. 

The land has in general an even skyline, though in places rounded 
hills show. Towards camp time [we passed] some precipices (of 
stratified limestone?). Elevation of skyline about 100 feet \ mile 
to ^ mile from beach. Beach partly gravel, partly slate — cloven 
and somewhat waterworn (limestone ?) . 

Caribou tracks fewer — three or four dozen all day, the last five 
or six just before camping. I fancy if they come to the coast here 
the rough ice turns them back [from crossing the Sound]. One 
ugrug, but weather not suited to their being out. Two cranes 

1 When clouds of a uniform color hang low there is reflected in them a map 
of the earth below them. Snow-free land and open water are shown in black 
on the clouds ; the pure white sea ice appears in white, and land covered 
with snow soiled by blown sand, etc., is reflected darker than the sea but 
lighter than snowless land. This sky map is of the greatest use to sledge 
travelers always, and especially in crossing wide bays from headland to 
headland ; where the landmarks themselves are below the horizon their po- 
sition is accurately indicated by their reflection in the clouds. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 299 

flying east high over the coasthne. Cold, cloudy, [wind] N W 20 
[miles per hour] and a little snow [falling] all day. 

Seeing the white men at Point Barrow living in frame houses 
would of itself have been sufficient to induce the Eskimo to do like- 
wise, for the white men are well-to-do and powerful, and therefore 
become leaders of fashion in the matter of houses as in other things. 
The Eskimo have not had the means to build houses as well con- 
structed as those of the white men, and even had they had the houses 
they would not have had the resources to keep them supplied with 
fuel, for coal is naturally expensive. 

But the pernicious practice of building frame houses has had more 
than the passive encouragement of the resident whites. Active 
steps have been taken by various well-meaning persons to try to get 
the Esldmo to quit what the white men consider their " native hovels" 
in favor of the frame house. It is the natural tendency of the thought- 
less white to assume that his ways are the best ways. Even the 
Department of Education has not been guiltless, for officers in Wash- 
ington have issued,' presumably on the basis of their experience of the 
climate of Virginia and Maryland, instructions to the school teachers 
in Alaska to encourage the Eskimo in general to adopt white men's 
ways. My friend Mr. J, E. Sinclair, who for a year taught the 
government school on Wainwright Inlet, told me that he had specific 
instructions to encourage the Eskimo to dig coal in the coal mine 
there with the double idea that they might use the coal for heating 
their houses, and that they might earn money with which to buy 
flour to eat instead of the seal meat and walrus which was their or- 
dinary diet. It is hard for me personally to get the point of view of 
a man who thinks that coal mining is a more desirable occupation than 
seal hunting. It would be a safe bet that he himself has never either 
hunted seal or dug coal. 

But during the last few years there has fortunately come a change, 
largely, I believe, through the influence of Mr. Lopp and Mr. Evans, 
the present superintendent and assistant superintendent of the gov- 
ernment schools of northern Alaska, who are men of considerable 
experience in the country, and who have come to see clearly that the 
white-man style of frame house is one of the most serious evils which 



300 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

they have to fight. Mr. Evans told me, the autumn of 1912, that he 
was doing everything he could to get the Eskimo to refrain from 
building frame houses and to induce them to go back to the building 
of houses of the old type. Any one who has the welfare of the Eskimo 
at heart will wish Mr. Evans success in his enterprise ; but any one 
who understands the Eskimo will fear that success will come with 
difficulty, if at all. For the frame house has unfortunately become 
fashionable. It is not easy to get our own people to refrain from cer- 
tain habits — of dress, for instance — on the ground that they are 
unhealthful. Neither will it be easy to get the Eskimo to avoid the 
frame house on the ground that it is dangerous to life. My experi- 
ence of the Eskimo is that they are even more inclined than the white 
race to eat, wear, and use things on the ground that they are expensive 
and fashionable rather than on the ground that they are excellent in 
themselves. 



CHAPTER XIX 

MAY 17th we had said good-by to these the last Eskimo 
whom we saw in Victoria Island. As mentioned above, 
their camp lay a little west of the middle of Prince Albert 
Sound. Although it must have been nearly two months since they 
started with loaded sledges on the eastward journey from their 
winter hunting district on the southeast shore of Banks Island, 
they were still living chiefly on supplies of polar bear meat brought 
with them; but the time had come for them to start the caribou 
hunt. Some of their friends had already moved into the mountains 
to the north that separate Prince Albert Sound from Minto Inlet, 
and it was the intention of these last three families with whom we 
had been visiting to follow them northward the day after our de- 
parture. As a matter of fact they would have gone even sooner 
had it not been for our visit. 

I think it was Cape Back for which we headed on leaving the 
Eskimo village. The charts were not very accurate here, any more 
than anywhere else in the Arctic, and it is only the most conspicuous 
points that one can certainly identify. After traveling for about 
four hours we camped to give me a chance to enter in my diary more 
fully the varied information of which I had taken only hasty notes 
during our stay with the people. 

In something like twelve miles of travel this day we must have 
crossed at least five hundred caribou tracks, but most of them were 
over a week old. The general direction in which the trails led was 
approximately northwest. We saw only three bands of eight, seven, 
and three animals respectively. All of them were too wild to allow 
us a close approach, although Natkusiak fired two or three vain 
shots at one of the bands. We saw no seals either. It was as yet 
too early for the common seal (foetida) to appear on top of the ice, 
and the bearded seals frequent in general only the neighborhood of 

301 



302 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

land. We expected that to-morrow on our approach to land we 
should see some of them. 

Our sled was so heavily loaded with the ethnological specimens 
purchased and the geological ones picked up on Victoria Island 
that it was impossible for us to haul much meat with us. Our 
second day therefore found us nearly out of food, when, according 
to expectations, on approaching within about seven miles of Cape 
Back we saw a bearded seal lying beside a tide crack out of 
which it had hauled itself. It was an especially wakeful animal and 
it took Natkusiak over two hours to make a successful approach. 
As neither the dogs nor ourselves had had quite enough to eat in the 
morning, we camped near where the animal was killed and allowed 
the dogs to gorge themselves. 

From Cape Back until we rounded Cape Baring we had rougher 
ice than we were used to and our heavy and bulky load made 
the going somewhat difficult. Here and there we were forced 
to use an axe which we had along with us for the purpose of road- 
making, and it sometimes took us an hour to make fifteen or twenty 
yards. Between Cape Baring and what the Admiralty chart calls 
"Cape Kendall" the ice was also rough, and moreover the weather 
was so thick with falling snow and fog that we could seldom see more 
than a few hundred yards. 

When we reached "Cape Kendall" we had come to the point 
from which our traverse of the western end of Dolphin and Union 
Straits had to be begun. Following the coast around toward Point 
Williams might have been the safer thing to do at this season of the 
year, for spring was approaching and the ice in the open sea could 
be expected to break up with a strong wind at any time and to 
float to the westward, carrying us off with it. But following the 
coast any farther was very much out of the way, and besides, I had a 
special reason for wanting to cross the Straits just at their western 
end where the charts place "Clerk Island." On our way east along 
the coast of the mainland the year before we had kept a keen look- 
out for Clerk Island, but had failed to see it. According to the ac- 
count of its discoverer. Sir John Richardson, it is a good-sized island 
lying not more than twelve miles off the mainland shore. It hap- 
pens that on this part of the mainland the Melvill Mountains 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 303 

are near the coast, and it had therefore been an easy thing for me 
to climb a few hundred feet into their slopes for the purpose of sweep- 
ing the sea ice with my glasses. The weather on this portion of our 
eastward journey had fortunately been clear, and although the 
mountains of Victoria Island itself, sixty miles away, were clearly 
visible, there was no sign of Clerk Island, although under the con- 
ditions of visibility which we had I should have been able to see an 
Eskimo camp had it been no farther offshore than Richardson 
describes Clerk Island as being. I had for a year been fairly 
clear in my mind that Clerk Island did not exist, and I was anxious 
to put the matter beyond doubt by crossing now in a direct line 
from "Cape Kendall" to Point Tinney, which should take us across 
the site of Clerk Island. 

As the common seals were not yet out, we decided that if we took 
to the ice of the Straits with our sled empty of meat (as it already 
was, for we had finished all we had taken with us of the seal killed 
two days before), we should probably starve, for none but common 
seals could be expected anything over five miles from shore. We 
were sailing so close to the wind in the matter of provisions, on ac- 
count of the weight of our load, that any untoward circumstance 
such as bad weather was sure to bring us to grief. It happened here 
that the weather remained unfavorable, cloudy, and with snow 
squalls. We camped for two days without being able to secure 
anything to eat. Of course we knew the tide was bound to turn 
soon, and the matter caused us no anxiety except that the season 
was advancing and each day the crossing of the Straits would become 
more and more dangerous. 

The third day dawned bright and clear and by nine o'clock in the 
morning the snow was thawing all around us. This was the first 
thaw we had seen in Victoria Island, although on the south shore of 
Coronation Gulf the thaws had already begun when we left the 
Teddy Bear three weeks before. With the coming out of the sun 
the seals came out also and Natkusiak and I soon had one each. 
By the middle of the afternoon (May 26) we were on the road to 
the mainland heading direct for Point Tinney and taking our course 
from a conspicuous mountain on the mainland which we knew from 
the year before. 



304 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

It is possible more than half a century after the event and long 
after the death of the distinguished explorer-naturalist who first de- 
scribed the mainland shore of Dolphin and Union Straits, to read his 
psychology, to an extent, as though the man himself were with us, 
by comparing his printed account with the facts. He was evidently 
rigorously truthful in matters of fact, but "conservative" in his 
judgments. If he says the formation is red sandstone, one may be 
sure it is sandstone, and red ; if he were to say he measured a stratum 
and found it ten feet thick, I should feel sure it was ten feet thick ; 
but if he says he estimated the stratum at ten feet, I should feel sure it 
was more than ten feet, and anything from fifteen to forty feet in 
all probability. That is "conservatism" — to be sure you always 
underestimate everything. In crossing Dolphin and Union Straits 
we had one of the many striking examples of this that have come to 
our notice. Richardson estimates the height of the Melvill Moun- 
tains on the mainland at about five hundred feet. We could see 
them from Victoria Island to the vicinity of Point Dease Thomp- 
son, though we stood on the sea ice. In other words, the higher 
sections of the mountains must be from 1500 to 2000 feet high. 

During our stay at " Cape Kendall " we found that it was not a cape 
at all but an island. This surprised me not so very greatly, for while 
the Admiralty charts of this region are good enough to sail by, one 
is accustomed to finding them unreliable in the details of the coast. 
Indeed they cannot well be anything else, for most of them are made 
from ships of great draft standing a long way offshore. From the 
masthead of such a ship even in clear weather there is much difficulty 
in seeing the true character of the coast line, and bad weather of 
course makes this impossible. 

The interesting thing about our discovery that " Cape Kendall " 
is an island is not that we discovered it, but the fact that Dr. John 
Rae had discovered it long before, as I have since learned from con- 
sulting his contribution to Vol. 22 of the Proceedings of the Royal 
Geographical Society. In his excellent journey in 1851 he had found 
here an island which he had named Bell Island, and he had located it 
correctly off the mouth of a bay which in reality exists exactly as he 
portrays it on his sketch map. Collinson, when he sailed past this 
point a year or two later, made observations to the effect that, 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 305 

true enough, at a distance this looks like an island, but on close 
approach he found it to be a part of the mainland and he therefore 
struck out the name of Bell Island and called it "Cape Kendall," and 
his "correction" was adopted by the makers of the Admiralty charts. 
We camped at the spot for several days and hunted seals all around 
the island and found it to be shaped as Dr. Rae indicates in his chart, 
to be located with reference to the bay exactly as he locates it, and 
to be separated from the mainland by a fairly deep channel, as is 
shown by the presence everywhere of ice cakes, which must draw at 
least twelve or fifteen feet of water. 

This is but one of the many instances of which I am aware that 
show the excellence of the work of John Rae, a man exact and truth- 
ful and in his methods of travel a generation ahead of his time, for 
while his countrymen were still using the (in many ways absurd) 
methods of travel which handicapped them so greatly and led to so 
much needless suffering and to so many deplorable tragedies, he had 
put into effect the only sound principle of the traveler — that of doing 
in Rome as the Romans do, which in the Arctic means using methods 
of travel which the forces of evolution have taught to the dwellers 
of icy lands, instead of methods which men, some of them in- 
genious and energetic, have evolved from their inner consciousness 
and from the limited experience of half a dozen years. 

It is a striking thing that John Rae wintered in Repulse Bay, using 
only the food and fuel which nature has provided at Repulse Bay, 
and that he did this within a decade of the time when Sir John Frank- 
lin's entire company of able-bodied Englishmen, equipped quite as 
well as Rae's party, starved helplessly and died to the last man in a 
country as well supphed with food and fuel as was that where Rae 
spent his winter in comfort. That the country where Franklin's 
men starved is sufficiently provided with means of subsistence is 
shown by the fact that it was peopled by Eskimo both before and 
after that great tragedy. At the very time when these Englishmen 
were dying of hunger there were living all about them Eskimo 
families who were taking care of their aged and bringing up their 
children in comparative plenty, unaided by the rifles and other 
excellent implements which the Englishmen had in abundance. 

When we parted with Dr. Anderson and Captain Bernard I had 



306 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

told them it was our intention to proceed to Banks Island and 
spend the summer there. It was arranged that the Teddy Bear 
would come along whenever the ice cleared off and would pick us up 
in the neighborhood of Nelson Head, but in case anything occurred 
to change our plans we were to build conspicuous beacons at one or 
more of half a dozen designated points on the shore of Victoria 
Island. The Teddy Bear when she came along would keep a keen 
lookout for these beacons and would get any information we had left 
in them. We had now made up our minds not to go to Banks Island 
because of learning that it was uninhabited in summer, and as Bell 
Island ("Cape Kendall") was one of the proposed beacon sites, 
we built on its southwest corner a tall cairn of stones and left there 
a short account of our doings and plans, inclosed in one of our air- 
tight malted milk tins. We had long ago consumed the last of the 
malted milk, but we still kept a few of the cans with us, for they 
were excellently made and ideal receptacles for matches or anything 
else that must not be dampened or affected by the weather. Of 
course this can would have been plunder to the Eskimo had they 
found it, but we knew that none of them were due to visit " Cape 
Kendall " until the spring of the following year, and we felt sure the 
Teddy Bear would come along before then, as she eventually did. 

I learned later from Dr. Anderson that it was on July 30th, or a 
little more than two months after we built the cairn, that they 
sighted it with their glasses from the schooner eight or ten miles out 
at sea and came in to pick up the message. Incidentally they veri- 
fied in summer what I had seen clearly enough in winter, that the 
place is really an island and not a cape. 

We learned from the Eskimo of Prince Patrick Sound that it 
was behind this island that Captain Klinkenberg wintered in the 
Olga the season of 1905 and 1906, which he himself thought he had 
spent in Banks Island. On his return to Herschel Island in August, 
1906, he had told us that looking southwest from his wintering place 
he was able to see land, and we had decided then that he must have 
wintered in Victoria Island near Minto Inlet and must have seen 
Banks Island across Prince of Wales Strait ; but we* now found that 
the land he saw to the southwest had been really the mainland of 
America, seen across Dolphin and Union Straits. 




Beacon built on Bell Island. 




Coronation Gulf Eskimo Men's Styles in Dress. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 307 

Few things in my traveling experience have been so startling as 
the change in climate apparent on our southwestward journey 
of sixty miles. The morning of our day of leaving Bell Island was the 
first thaw of the year at that place. The second day out from there, 
thirty or so miles to the southwest, it became evident that warm spring 
weather had been In force for a considerable time, for the snow was 
nearly gone off the ice. A few of the deeper snowdrifts only remained, 
and water channels furrowed the surface everywhere. On the third 
day this became still more apparent ; and on the fourth, when we ap- 
proached the mainland shore, the ice was in a condition that could 
be produced only by three weeks or a month of thaws. The 
tide cracks which at this season of the year should in the neighbor- 
hood of Victoria Island be no more than a foot or eighteen inches 
in width, had near the mainland less than sixty miles south been 
eaten by running water to a width of four or five feet, so that to 
cross them with a sledge became a difficult matter. The season 
seemed to be a full month earlier on the mainland than on Victoria 
Island. 

We kept our course for Point Tinney, guided still by our conspicu- 
ous mountain, for we were fortunate enough to have clear weather all 
the way. We were still twelve or fifteen miles off the mainland shore 
and just passing the mouth of the Crocker River when in one of our 
short halts we heard a noise as of the rustling of wind among leaves 
or as the roar of a waterfall made faint through distance. I took 
the noise to be made by the rushing waters of Crocker River, but 
Natkusiak was of another opinion. He had been worried from the 
start about the crossing, for, like all Eskimo known to me, he was 
excessively timid in the matter of venturing far offshore on the sea 
ice. He now declared that it was clear that the ice on which we were 
had drifted offshore and what we heard was the noise of the waves 
breaking against the edge of the ice floe on which we were floating off 
to sea. I did not much believe this, but acting (as I always mean to 
do) on the principle that it is better to be safe than sorry, and at 
the strong instance of Natkusiak, I headed straight for shore so as 
to find out the worst at once. The main object of the crossing had 
been accomplished, — that of showing that Clerk Island was not 
where it is located on the charts,— but had we continued our 



308 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

course for Point Tinney we should have saved a day of extra 
travel. 

It turned out that these last twelve miles or so before reaching 
shore were a very difficult stretch to negotiate. The nearer we got 
to land the more water there was on the ice and the deeper were the 
channels through which it was running towards the tide cracks by 
which it joined the water of the sea. Many of these channels were 
eighteen inches or even two feet in depth, and here and there actual 
holes had appeared in the ice so that we had to be careful to see 
that neither ourselves nor our sled and dogs went through to the 
bottom. 

Perhaps three miles from shore we were stopped by a lead about 
twenty feet wide. It was clear now that Natkusiak had been mistaken 
and that the noise we heard was really the noise of Crocker River. 
It is probable that had we kept our course for Point Tinney we should 
not have been confronted at landing with so wide a lead as this was, 
for the fresh water brought down from inland by Crocker River had 
evidently contributed much to the decay of the ice in the immediate 
vicinity. In fact the mud brought down by the river was scattered 
all over the ice, and this had much accelerated the thawing. The point 
at which we were trying to land was four or five miles west of the 
mouth of Crocker River. 

A twenty-foot lead is of course far too wide to cross in the ordinary 
way, but before devising extraordinary means we scouted a mile or so 
east and west along the lead to see if there were no narrow places, or 
else loose ice cakes one of which we could use for a raft in crossing. 
There was no sign of either. To the eastward the lead naturally got 
wider and wider towards the mouth of the river ; to the westward it 
maintained its width, and its course ran through such rough pressure 
ice that to follow it with a sled was out of the question. 

The lead was full of seals. We first thought of shooting two or 
three of them, skinning them, inflating the skins, and using them for 
floats to carry the sled across the lead — a thing which Eskimo often 
do (such an inflated sealskin has the buoyancy of about three hundred 
pounds). We had, however, been wading knee-deep through water 
for ten or twelve hours and were cold, tired, and sleepy, and impatient 
of any delay such as would have been caused by the kilHng and skin- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 309 

ning of several seals. Besides, the wind was beginning to blow from 
offshore and there was no means of telling that delay would not be 
disastrous. At this season of the year a strong land wind may drive 
all the ice away from shore and break it up into small cakes — just 
what Natkusiak had supposed was happening when we first heard the 
noise of Crocker River. 

We had with us a ten-gallon galvanized iron screw-topped tank 
which had originally contained alcohol for the preservation of zoolog- 
ical specimens, but which we had for a year used in our sledge travel 
as a receptacle for blubber for our dogs and lamps. Captain Bernard 
of the Teddy Bear had given us a five-gallon kerosene tin and a brass 
water-bottle which we had used for carrying drinking water. What 
kerosene there was left in the tin we emptied into a teapot and a tin 
dish we had with us ; then we closed tightly the alcohol tin and the 
water-bottle and lashed them to the frame of our sled which we had 
previously nailed. With a shovel for a paddle we pushed the sledge 
into the water and I got aboard it to paddle across. As a measure of 
precaution we took care, before launching the sled into the water, to 
fasten a rope to it for Natkusiak to hold so that in case the buoyancy 
proved insufficient he would at least be able to haul me back to the 
ice again. 

The floating power of the sledge fitted with the tin cans proved 
to be just so much that it settled till the water was up to my waist 
as I sat on the sled. Paddling it was slow work, and much to the 
surprise of both of us it kept settling gradually until I was nearly 
up to my arms in the water, and it became evident that our contriv- 
ance was going to sink. This seemed to me to controvert the laws of 
nature, but nevertheless I told Natkusiak to pull the sled back again. 
When we got the sled up on the ice, it turned out that the alcohol 
can had half filled with water. Two years before we had cached it 
with its contents of alcohol near the tip of Cape Parry, and on our re- 
turn a fev/ months after leaving it we found it empty and lying on 
its side. We had taken it for granted that a polar bear had upset it 
and that the alcohol had leaked out through the screw top, and al- 
though since then we had used it for a year as a blubber receptacle, 
we had never noticed the fact that there was in the bottom of it a 
round hole a quarter of an inch in diameter through which the water 



310 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

had of course rushed In to fill the can as soon as we had pushed the 
sledge-raft into the water. 

We emptied the can, blocked up the hole, launched the sledge 
again, and this time I was able to paddle it all the way across the lea 
without getting any deeper than the waist into the water. When 
I was once across, it was a simple matter by the use of a rope to pull 
the sledge backwards and forwards across the lead and in that way 
to ferry all our gear safely over in a dozen or so loads of fifty pounds 
each. Next to the last came the dogs, for it was freezing rather hard, 
and we did not care to make the poor animals swim. Last of all 
Natkusiak himself was hauled over. Half an hour later we were 
safely ashore on the mainland of the continent of North America 
and had built a roaring driftwood fire. For the time being our 
troubles were over. 



CHAPTER XX 

DURING the two or three weeks that followed our crossing 
south from Victoria Island, our progress westward along 
the mainland coast was slow on account of frequent 
troubles in getting around the open spaces in the sea ice created 
by the mouths of small rivers, each of which was bringing its 
quota of warm inland water to help thaw out the sea. We had now 
and then to make a considerable detour to seaward through rough ice 
to avoid these river deltas. We lived during this time entirely on 
seals ; for the grizzly bears, which had been numerous here a month 
earlier in the season the year before, had now all moved inland. The 
small seals were out in numbers, basking on the ice. Although 
white men agree in general in preferring the flesh of the bearded to 
that of the small seal, my tastes are in that matter, as in most other 
things, with the Eskimo, so we shot only common seals, though the 
bearded variety were also abundant. 

I neglected to say that on our way from Bell Island across the 
Straits to Point Tinney Natkusiak killed a polar bear which was the 
largest animal of its kind I have ever happened to see, although 
not quite so large as others the skins of which I have seen among 
the Eskimo. I measured it with a common string, for my tape did 
not happen to be convenient at the moment, and then of course I 
lost the string before the measurements got recorded. I suppose 
the animal would have weighed in the neighborhood of eight hundred 
pounds. According to our custom we carried with us only about two 
days' supply of this bear meat. This was our only change in diet from 
the time we left the Victoria Island Eskimo, May 17th, until about 
a month later, when we shot some sea gulls near Cape Lyon. Other- 
wise we lived entirely on seals. 

One of the first things we did on landing near Crocker River was 
to climb a hill several hundred feet high to have another look for 
Clerk Island. As was the case a year previous, we had clear weather 

311 



312 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

and could see Victoria Island plainly enough, but there were no signs 
of Clerk Island, which should, according to the chart, have lain 
between us and Victoria Island and less than half as far off. Every 
five or eight miles or so on the way west from this point I had 
another vain look to seaward. Clearly the island was not there. 

In this connection it is worth noting that Richardson himself did 
not see the island on his second voyage through the Straits in 1848, 
nor did Collinson see it when he passed that way aboard the Enter- 
prise. I told Captain Bernard, when I visited him in Coronation 
Gulf, of my suspicions in the matter and I learned later that the 
following August (1911) he and Dr. Anderson cruised backward and 
forward over the site without discovering even a sign of a shoal 
or sand bank. On the other hand I have spoken with American 
whalemen who say they have seen the island. Captain S. F. Cottle 
of the steam whaler Belvedere is sure not only that he has seen it but 
that it is in the location where the chart puts it. But I have also 
learned since that Captain Amundsen in the Gjoa, in 1906, sailed near 
the supposed location of the island, if not quite over it, without 
seeing any sign of it. 

We found on landing every indication that spring had been on 
the mainland over a month. Dr. Richardson remarks in his "Arctic 
Search Expedition" that there is a month's difference in the season 
between the mouth of the Mackenzie and the eastern end of Dolphin 
and Union Straits. My own experience of two different years goes 
to confirm this observation, and also to show that the dividing line 
between the colder and warmer districts is more sharply drawn than 
would have been suspected. In other words, although Crocker 
River may be considered to be at the western end of the Straits, 
nevertheless the difference in season between it and the eastern end 
of the Straits is nearly as great as Richardson assigns for the difference 
between Mackenzie River and their eastern end. The same differ- 
ence holds between the mouth of the Crocker River and the south- 
west corner of Victoria Island, as we have already remarked. There 
are probably few other places on the earth's surface where it is possible 
by traveling sixty miles south, without changing from one altitude 
to a lower one, to pass from winter into summer in a day. We 
left Bell Island on May 26th, which was the date of the first thaw 




Skinning a Large Bear. 




The Pabt that went to Waste because onR Party was too Small to Eat or 

Haul the Meat. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 313 

of the year at that place, as we could tell pretty certainly from the 
appearance of the snow and ice. We landed on the mainland at 
Crocker River May 29th, to find nearly all of the snow gone and the 
season in every way at least four weeks in advance of Bell Island. 

The ground was now bare of snow where everything had been 
covered with it as we journeyed east the year before. This was my 
opportunity to find out what traces of human habitation there were 
on the land. Unfortunately I could not do this thoroughly, for there 
were only two of us, which is the minimum number for successfully 
managing a sledge on rough ice. There should never be less than 
three in a sledging party, so that two can travel ahead with the sled 
and the third can be free to hunt, whether it be for game or for scien- 
tific evidences of one sort or another. At our landing at Crocker 
River, however, we found the remains of ancient dwellings which 
were, so far as we could tell without excavating them, of the same 
type as those around Cape Parry. 

Apropos of the statement implied in the previous paragraph, 
that we did not stop to excavate these interesting ruins, it is worth 
pointing out that the conditions under which excavation can be done 
in the Arctic are different from those that prevail in any other part 
of the world. Had the climate been a more southerly one, we might 
have probed each mound or ruin the day we discovered it, for it would 
not have taken long to dig at least a narrow trench down to the 
bottom of one of the ruins. Such things cannot be done in the 
North, where the frost is never but a few inches below the surface. 
To do in the Arctic regions archaological excavating of any account 
one should commence immediately after the spring warmth arrives, 
by taking off the grass sward from the entire surface of the ruin to 
be excavated. This will mean removing only two or three inches 
at first, but that leaves a black surface upon which the sun can work 
rapidly. The result will be that on each ordinary summer day 
a layer of earth will thaw out at least two or three inches thick. No 
excavation of great depth can be accomplished within a few days, for 
each three or four inch layer of thawed ground has to be removed 
before the sun gets a good chance to thaw out another layer. This 
is the only possible method, and it will be seen that it does not lend 
itself to a casual dipping into the problems of every mound one 



314 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

happens to pass on a journey. Besides, we had only a sledge, and it 
was necessary for us to reach Langton Bay before the sea ice had 
gone, else we could not cross the deep bays and swift rivers 
that intervened, and then we should be unable to do near Cape Parry 
the archaeological work which would help so materially to change 
to an accomplished fact what had been up to now but the scientific 
program of the expedition. 

On the entire westward journey, whenever we camped or went 
ashore for any reason, I always took long walks in the search for 
archaeological remains, leaving Natkusiak to do the cooking and 
camp work. The result was that we established the fact that a 
continuous chain of human habitations of the general western wood- 
and-earth type runs at least as far east as Crocker River, and we know 
no reason to suppose that it ends there abruptly. More probably 
it will be found to extend to the vicinity of Cape Krusenstern, al- 
though the Dolphin and Union Straits people of the present day 
never make permanent dwellings of any kind, nor use anything that 
can be called a house, except the snow house. The Cape Bexley 
people told us that some of them were descended from people who 
had lived farther along the coast to the west beyond Crocker River, 
and who had dwelt in earth-and-wood houses. I am inclined to 
think, however, that either the story is entirely untrustworthy or 
else it is a very old one and has undergone considerable change, 
for they told us that those ancestors of theirs used to live in snow 
houses in the winter time, "as all men do of course," and that they 
lived in these earth-and-wood houses in the summer time. 

That story seems to me essentially absurd on the face of it, for no 
Eskimo on the north coast of North America ever lived in earth-and- 
wood houses in summer, or indeed in anything except in tents, so far 
as I know. It is the nature of the Eskimo style of house that it begins 
dripping in the spring as soon as the sun begins to thaw the snow on 
the roof, and must therefore be abandoned even before the ground 
is bare of snow. The water forms in a puddle on the floor so that the 
interior of every Eskimo house is like a little lake all summer, and the 
dwelling is unfit for occupation until a week or two of hard frost in 
the autumn has solidified everything, when people can go in with 
adzes or picks, chop out the ice, and cover the floor with some dry 




The Story of a Forgotten Tragedy. 

The owner left this sled on the shore before proceeding inland in summer, weighted 

it with stones, and never came back to take the stones off. Finally 

the sled collapsed with age. 




Skinning a Seal for Supper. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 315 

covering. That is the Mackenzie River way at least. On the 
north coast of Alaska wooden floors are sometimes so constructed 
that the water does not cover them, but nevertheless there is con- 
tinual damp and dripping whenever it rains, so the essential fact re- 
mains that the house is uninhabitable the entire summer through. 
These remarks, of course, have no reference to the modern "civilized" 
dwellings of the north Alaskans. 

A thing of some ethnological importance is that we found numer- 
ous fragments of sledges all the way from Crocker River west, and 
they are all of the same type, which is the short Mackenzie River 
type, and not the long sledge now in use on Victoria Island and Coro- 
nation Gulf and everywhere to the eastward to King William Island 
and beyond. The longest of the runners of these sledges were never 
six feet, while in the east they run from twelve feet to over twenty. 
This, of course, is not for the reason that timber is more abundant in 
the east and of greater size — driftwood is scarcer the farther east you 
go. The short sledges are made in a district where logs of all sizes 
and dimensions up to eighty feet are found lying strewn thick along 
the beach. 

Dr. Richardson, in his account of his boat voyage past this coast 
in 1848, concludes that whaling was not carried on systematically 
farther east than Cape Lyon, and he justifies that belief by the state- 
ment that villages of earth-and-wood houses are not found farther 
east than Cape Lyon. Standing well offshore generally, as he did 
in his boats, he of course had no means of telling certainly that the 
villages did not extend farther east. We found not only that they 
did extend to the eastward of Cape Lyon, as above stated, but also 
that the evidence furnished by the bones of whales scattered here and 
there along the beach, especially in the neighborhood of some of the 
ruined villages, indicates that whaling was carried on. That, to- 
gether with the short sledge and the earth-and-wood house, connects 
the population of the entire mainland coast from Cape Parry east, 
as far at least as Crocker River, with the Mackenzie River people, 
rather than with those of Coronation Gulf. 

West of Crocker River to Langton Bay and beyond, the Melvill 
Mountains are almost everywhere less than ten miles from the coast 
and must be in general well over a thousand feet in height, but east 



316 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

of Crocker River they are farther inland and may be lower, although 
there are certain conspicuous high peaks. West of Crocker River 
the foot-hills generally come down to the water's edge. From near 
Point Pierce the mountains run diagonally southwest towards the 
southeast corner of Darnley Bay, leaving a comparatively low but 
hilly triangle of land running out to a tip at Cape Lyon, which is 
farther from the mountains proper than any other point on the 
coast. 

West of Point Dease Thompson we have one of the most pic- 
turesque sections of the long coast hne along which we were traveling, 
although the whole of it is varied and in many places striking. It 
is here that Sir John Richardson gives us a sketch of what he calls 
"Torso Rock" and of the natural bridge behind it. We reproduce 
his sketch here along with photographs of the same features to show 
that the pencil has certain advantages above the camera in the 
illustration of one's travels, for it is impossible to select any position 
on sea or land from which the Torso Rock and the larger natural 
bridge can be seen both at once, although the smaller one, which is 
about a hundred yards from the larger, can be seen from the neigh- 
borhood of Torso Rock. 

On the entire coast from Crocker River westward there is plenty 
of driftwood for fuel wherever there is a beach upon which the waves 
can lodge it. It is an interesting thing, though not quite so notice- 
able here as it is towards the Mackenzie and west of it, that the 
driftwood is always found in greater abundance and sometimes ex- 
clusively on westward-facing beaches. The explanation is of course 
simple. "Low tides" occur w^ith easterly winds and "high tides" 
with westerly ones. Consequently, if a stick is thrown ashore by an 
easterly wind the next westerly one will, with its higher level of water, 
float it off again; while the westerly wind with its high tide will 
lodge the driftwood well above the reach of the most violent easterly 
gale — indeed the more violent the easterly gale the lower the tide. 
The easterly wind can therefore never take away what the westerly 
wind has brought. 

It is worth pointing out here, too, that the prevailing direction of 
the wind in Dolphin and Union Straits and western Victoria Island 
influences the distribution of driftwood on the shores of Prince Albert 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 317 

Sound and the Straits themselves. The prevaiHng winds are north- 
westerly, and for that reason driftwood is found in some abundance 
on the south shore of Prince Albert Sound, although there is very- 
little on the north shore. This we know from hearsay from the 
Eskimo, for we have not had occasion to follow the south shore of the 
Sound except between Cape Back and Cape Baring. On this stretch 
we found only a few little sticks, but that was no doubt because deep 
snow covered the wood of which the Eskimo had told us. 

It is also by hearsay that we know that there is little wood on the 
southwest coast of Victoria Island from Bell Island east to Lady 
Franklin Point. We found a considerable straggling of small sticks 
on the beach near Forsythe Bay, at the foot of Simpson Bay, but 
nothing like the quantity which is found on the opposite mainland 
coast everywhere from Lambert Island west. Even on the mainland 
coast, however, large pieces of driftwood are rare east of Inman River. 

That driftwood is found on any of the coasts of Victoria Island 
and the narrow portions of Dolphin and Union Straits is due to the 
fact that the Eskimo do not use wood for fuel. They consequently 
have for the present enough wood for their implements and for such 
articles as sledges. One of the effects of civilization will be that when 
they learn to use sheet-iron stoves they will in the course of two or 
three years burn all the wood that centuries have stored on the beach, 
exactly as the people in the vicinity of Point Barrow have done, and 
they will then, like the Point Barrow people, be under the necessity 
of importing wood when they need it to make the things that they 
can now make out of driftwood which they find on the beach. 

In passing Point Pierce the year before we had noticed nothing 
particular about it except the magnificent vertical cliff of stratified 
limestone, the finest of the entire Arctic coast of America west of the 
Coppermine River. Now, on closer approach, we found that in the 
very tip of Point Pierce is one of the finest ship harbors, so far as we 
could judge, of the entire Arctic coast. Judging from the large cakes 
of drift ice which had floated in, there must be an entrance here for 
ships of over twenty foot draft (very likely over forty), and there is 
shelter from all winds. There is, however, an evidently dangerous 
line of reefs running in a curve convex to the shore from Point Pierce 
to Cape Lyon. A ship wishing to enter the Point Pierce harbor should 



318 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

therefore keep well offshore until directly off the high-cut cliff which 
forms the point, and should then stand directly south, entering the 
harbor at right angles to the line of the coast, running between the 200- 
foot high-cut cliff of the point proper on the west and the 50-foot high 
knoll of basaltic rock to the east. When we discovered this harbor, we 
were traveling along after midnight through a heavy rain and we were 
soaking wet, so that we felt disinclined to stop to measure the width 
of the entrance of the harbor or the dimensions of it ; but I should 
say the entrance is over two hundred yards wide and there is room in 
the harbor for ten or more ships of the ordinary whaling vessel type. 

We had previously discovered other harbors, though apparently 
none as good as this — one of them behind a small island southwest 
of Liston and Sutton Islands. This harbor is so hard to find that I 
doubt if I myself could find it again in rough weather, for the island 
which nearly closes the little bay looks as if it were a part of the main- 
land until you are right in the channel which separates it from the 
coast. At Point Keats is another harbor, which might perhaps 
more properly be called a shelter. Point Keats is T-shaped, so 
that a ship can get shelter from any wind by merely rounding it 
when necessary. In neither of these two places did we have such 
conclusive evidence of deep water as we did at Point Pierce. In fact 
it is probable that the harbor southeast of Liston Island is shoal. 

Both at the Torso Rock and at various other points along the 
coast we had found gull rookeries chiefly inhabited by glaucous gulls, 
although there were also a few of the glaucous-winged and California 
gulls. The first really large rookery we came to was in the cliffs of 
Point Pierce, and there were others in the pillar rocks which in three 
places rise out of the reef that runs from Point Pierce to Cape Lyon. 
We would not have done so earlier in the season, but now we were 
so near home that we felt we could afford to use a few rifle cartridges 
in getting some gulls for a change of diet. At a more critical stage 
of our journey we should have followed our ordinary policy of never 
using bullets for anything smaller than a seal or a wolf. 

Cape Lyon, better than any headland I have seen, deserves the 
name of a cape. With most capes it is difficult to tell just where 
the tip of them is because you round them so gradually and there 
seems to be no conspicuous sharp angle. The angle of Cape Lyon is 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 319 

as sharp as that of the Flatiron Building; the direction of the cliff 
front turns more than a right angle in the space of a fathom or so. 
The sea is evidently very deep right up to the foot of the cliff. One 
of the most difficult things we have ever done was to round Cape Lyon 
on the slanting ice ledge that was not in some places more than two 
yards wide between the cliff face and an open lead twenty feet in 
width. A pouring rain made the task not only more disagreeable but 
also more difficult, and the sled more than once barely missed sliding 
into the water. A few yards farther on, where the ledge had widened 
again so there was no longer danger of our sliding off into the water, 
the sledge upset. The load was so heavy and so high on the sled, and 
Natkusiak had been trying so hard to keep it from upsetting, that 
it fell on top of him and pinned him in the soft snow so completely 
that he could scarcely move a finger and would have been entirely 
unable to extricate himself without assistance. As it was it took 
what strength I had to lift the load enough to allow him to get from 
under it. The snow had been soft and no injury was done. 



CHAPTER XXI 

MORE than a year before, when I parted from Dr. Anderson 
near Langton Bay, I had asked him to make a cache for 
us in a little bight five miles south of Cape Lyon, in case 
we had not returned during the summer of 1910. Dr. Anderson 
and Ilavinirk had accordingly made the cache in October, 1910. 

It was on the morning of June 9th that, soon after rounding 
Cape Lyon, we got to the site of this cache, to find that it had been 
torn down by polar bears. A rifle that had been left on an elevated 
platform constructed of driftwood on shore we found a hundred yards 
or so out on the sea ice. There had also been some bearded seal 
meat, but that the bears had naturally eaten. By a letter which I 
found here from Dr. Anderson it appeared that they had left for us, 
besides the meat and some blubber, fifty pounds of flour, five pounds 
of rice, two pounds of tea, one package of matches, a tin of salt, a sheet- 
iron stove and stove pipes, and some ammunition. The flour we 
found in several heaps on the ground where it had been scattered by 
the bear when he tore the bag open. We found a pile of rice at the 
bottom of a small rivulet ; the tea, tobacco, and matches were all wet, 
and the only things quite safe were the cartridges and the tin of salt. 
Of course Dr. Anderson had expected when he made the cache that 
we should come for all these things the winter of 1910-1911; had 
we done which we might have found everything in order. That 
we should come in winter was the whole idea of caching these stores, 
for in the summer we should of course be in no straits for food. 

It is one of the admirable qualities of flour that water will not 
penetrate a pile of it, so that although it had been raining heavily 
and repeatedly for a month we found a little dry flour at the center 
of every heap and were able to make out of it some pancakes. We 
had been so long without salt that the desire for it was quite gone, 
and I do not remember now whether we took the salt can or left it 
behind. 

320 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 321 

We tried at first to follow the shore around the foot of Darnley 
Bay, for the bay has never been mapped and we were desirous of mak- 
ing a survey of it. We made a geographical discovery almost imme- 
diately, however, which was interesting in itself but prevented a fur- 
ther exploration of the bay, for there are two good-sized rivers that 
come into it from the southeast and they had brought down so much 
warm water that all the ice in the southeast corner of the bay was so 
eaten up with holes and cracks that sledging had become impossible. 
We were therefore forced to cross the hay, which was indeed the short- 
est and simplest thing to do. Here and there on our way across we 
found open leads, but in every case by following them for a few miles 
we found cakes of ice which had broken loose from one bank of the lead 
or the other, which were oblong in shape, and which had turned 
around so that their ends nearly or quite touched both sides of the 
lead. These gave us bridges on which to cross. Most of them were 
so uncertain, however, that we did not have the nerve to delay on them 
while the process of crossing was being photographed. The best 
I could do was to photograph one of the cakes just after we had 
crossed. 

Seals, like caribou, have certain favorite feeding grounds. The 
most remarkable place for bearded seals ever seen by us is the narrow 
portion of Dolphin and Union Straits east and west of Lambert 
Island, but the common seal (foetida) we never saw anywhere in such 
numbers as on Darnley Bay. Standing on the sea ice at one time, for 
instance, I counted over four hundred within a radius of three miles 
or so. Most of them had come up through open leads and were lying 
strung along their edges like strings of black beads, but here and there 
away from the course of any lead there were sprinkled broadcast 
others that had come up through their enlarged winter breathing- 
holes and were lying beside them. 

On June 16th, at the southwest corner of Darnley Bay, we left 
behind us all our geological specimens and everything we had with 
us which water and the animals would not be likely to destroy, and 
commenced the difficult undertaking of hauling the sledge loaded 
with Eskimo skin clothing and other ethnological specimens of a 
perishable nature across the twenty miles or more of land that sepa- 
rated Darnley Bay from Langton Bay. Had we been a week or so 



322 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

earlier this would not have been difficult, for although the land had 
been bare longer than that, there were numerous lakes on this neck 
of land so that at least fifteen of the twenty miles could have been 
negotiated over ice. But now the lakes were breaking up. 

I do not think we have ever been in greater danger of our lives 
than we were in crossing a lake about five miles wide, which we 
reached after laboriously dragging the sledge over a ridge of hills 
perhaps a hundred feet high and half a mile wide that separates it 
from Darnley Bay. We knew the ice was not safe, but the sledging 
had been so hard that the smooth surface of the lake was a great 
temptation ; and besides, if we did not cross the lake, we had to go a 
good many miles out of our way to round it, and we would have had 
to ferry in some place or other across more than one deep river. 

Fresh-water ice, when it thaws in the spring, behaves in a manner 
fundamentally different from salt-water ice. No doubt this is a 
matter of common knowledge among physicists and a few others, 
but it was first brought forcibly to my attention the summer we 
spent on the Coppermine River. In the spring freshets huge blocks 
of ice had been left stranded on the bottom lands of the river well 
in among some trees. I remember one morning passing one of these 
and noticing that it was quite as high as I was myself. In the even- 
ing when I returned over the same ground I was astonished to find 
the bowlder of ice missing. A little search showed me, however, a 
flattened-out heap of crystals, some of them a foot or more in length. 
The whole cake had divided into separate crystals and all of a sudden 
the forces of cohesion had given way and the whole thing had settled 
down into a loose pile. Later on I used to walk up to these stranded 
bowlders of ice and give them a smart blow with a stick or something. 
It happened now and then that one of them would crumble at a 
touch into exactly such a heap as that into which the first big bowlder 
had degenerated. 

When after crossing the half-mile wide ridge from Darnley Bay we 
entered upon the ice surface of the first of the lakes which in summer 
furnish a portage route to near Langton Bay, I noticed that all the 
ice was breaking up into needles or crystals in the manner of the 
bowlders of ice on the Coppermine River. I had with me a sharp 
pointed pole and by jabbing it into the ice I was able to force it be- 




Water on Top Solid Sea Ice in June. 




Loose Ice Cake forming Bridge across Lead. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 323 

tween the ice crystals clear through the ice into the water below, 
although the ice was at least three feet thick. When we discovered 
the sort of condition the ice was in we decided to wait a few hours, 
for, although the season was well advanced, we usually had a little 
frost after midnight. We waited until two or three in the morning, 
hoping for the usual frost which would cement the ice needles together 
a little and make the crossing safer, but unfortunately this proved 
to be the first night of the year (June 14th) when it did not freeze 
at all. 

We made the crossing, nevertheless, going carefully as possible 
and with our hearts in our mouths the whole way. When we got 
within about fifty yards of the other shore, we found that the land 
was separated from us by a channel of open water. We unhitched 
the dogs with the idea that we would fasten together all the ropes 
we had, take the dogs ashore somehow, hitch them to one end of 
the rope on land, while the other was made fast to the sled out on 
the ice beyond the lane of shore water, and drive off at a sharp run, 
hoping that the ice would not break until the sled was so near shore 
that it would plump down into shallow water only. 

The first dog we unhitched was eager to get ashore, and as 
soon as his harness was removed he started off on a brisk trot 
for the land ; but while he was yet as much as ten feet from the edge 
of the water that separated him from the land, the ice, which was 
more than a foot thick at that place, suddenly crumbled to pieces 
under him and he fell into the water. This scared him, and he 
turned around and tried to climb back on to the ice again ; but as fast 
as he tried to climb upon it it crumbled into separate crystals, and as 
he swam towards us he made with his pawing a channel through the 
ice up to within about ten feet of where we stood, where the ice finally 
became solid enough for him to haul himself out. 

Evidently we were in a dangerous place. With my long pole 
I punched a hole in the ice and found that the water was over six feet 
in depth. It was therefore hopeless to try to land at this point. For- 
tunately, about a half a mile to the south was a cut bank in the shelter 
of which a thick snowdrift extended out upon the lake ice, and we 
found that underneath the snow of this drift the ice had not decom- 
posed into crystals. We therefore hitched up the sled again, drove 



324 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

around to this point, and were able to get the sled into less than 
three feet of water before the ice broke down. Even at that we got 
the larger portion of our load pretty well soaked, but the weather 
was fine and by spreading the skins and clothing out to dry in the 
evening we had them in fit condition against the next morning. I 
have not mentioned it before, but this had been our routine work every 
day since we landed at Crocker River, for there was scarcely a ten- 
mile stretch where we did not have to cross some channel of water 
so deep that the larger portion of the load got soaking wet. Had 
we allowed the things to remain undried, the beautiful skin clothing 
of which our load partly consisted would have rotted to pieces be- 
fore we got to Langton Bay. 

It took us ten days of the hardest toil to cover the twenty miles 
that separated us from Langton Bay. We ventured on the ice of no 
more lakes, and in fact most of the lakes were already open. We had 
been living on seal meat up to this time, but now we lived on geese 
and swans. The neck of Cape Parry is one of the great swan breeding 
grounds. The birds themselves are not difficult to shoot with a rifle, 
and the nests are among the most conspicuous objects in the animal 
life of the Arctic. A swan's nest is the size of a bushel basket and is 
usually built on the barren shore of a lake. The dun color of the 
nest itself and the spotless white bird on top of it can be seen with 
the naked eye much farther than either the caribou or the grizzly 
bear. There are often six eggs in a nest, and as they are more than 
twice the size of the egg of a goose, half a dozen of them would make a 
square meal for a fairly hungry man. There were also some caribou 
in this district, and one day while Natkusiak was cooking lunch I 
secured three of them and two days later another two besides. 

By June 20th, while we were still making the overland crossing, 
the mosquitoes had become so numerous as to make sleep almost im- 
possible, for we had no mosquito nets with us. This made us strug- 
gle all the harder, for our base camp at Langton Bay was now less than 
twenty miles away, and we knew that we would find there not only 
our Eskimo companions and a comfortable camp, but best of all 
and most important, mosquito nets under which we could get a com- 
fortable night's rest. 

Early on the morning of June 23d we reached the sea ice near the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 325 

northeast corner of Langton Bay. It was fifteen miles from this spot 
to the Langton Bay harbor where our permanent camp was situated, 
and the ice was smooth and level in front of us so that we expected 
to be home within four hours. But although the ice was white as 
if in winter, near the shoal east end of the bay where there are no 
strong currents, it gradually became worse and worse as we got over 
deeper water, and when we approached the harbor where the tide 
currents are strong at all times of the year we saw that to reach land 
on the harbor side of the bay was going to be impossible. Three 
miles from shore the water channels on top of the ice had become 
so deep that the dogs had to swim in crossing them and our sled was 
half under water. 

A little less than three miles from shore progress with the load 
became impossible, and I had to leave Natkusiak with the sled and 
to work my way carefully as near to the Langton Bay sand spit as 
possible. With my glasses I could see our Eskimo in camp on shore. 
Smoke was rising, showing that they were awake and cooking break- 
fast. As I worked my way cautiously toward shore I had several 
narrow escapes from falling through holes in the ice. Salt-water 
ice when it thaws never disintegrates into separate crystals as does 
fresh-water ice, and it is always tough and reliable. In the spring 
there is little danger of falling through it unless one steps into an 
open hole, and in the fall we much prefer an inch and a half of salt- 
water ice to two inches and a half of fresh, for fresh- water ice cracks 
like the breaking of a window pane, but salt-water ice bends before 
breaking and always gives you warning. However, in this case, while 
I was still a mile and a half from shore I came to a place where there 
was no more fast ice in front, but only big cakes floating back and 
forth in the deep current-swept ship channel that separates Langton 
Bay harbor on the south from the low sand spit three miles north 
of it. 

There was nothing for it but to stop, for a channel of ice-water a 
mile and a half wide and ten fathoms deep is scarcely easier to swim 
across than it would be to wade over. I could do nothing but al- 
ternately fire my rifle over the heads of the people ashore and wave 
my coat for a signal. They neither heard me nor saw me until 
Mamayauk, following a characteristic habit of hers, came out of the 



326 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

tent with her husband's spy-glass to sweep with it the ice for a 
possible polar bear or seal. Through my field glasses I could see 
her take her seat on a log outside the tent and begin her survey of 
the horizon at the west, her glass methodically sweeping the ice east- 
ward. It was then a question of only a few minutes until she was 
bound to see us, for I knew her to have a keen eye from which few 
things escaped. No sooner had she brought her glass into line with 
where I stood waving my coat than she dropped it on the beach and 
ran towards the end of the sand spit where I now noticed for the first 
time the head of her husband Ilavinirk, where he was sitting behind 
a log, apparently watching at the end of the sand spit for seals that 
might swim past. Five minutes later Ilavinirk and Palaiyak in 
two kayaks were coming out towards me, alternately paddling across 
open water and climbing on to cakes of ice which they had to cross 
before they could launch their kayaks again. 

It was a happy home-coming for all of us. Natkusiak and I were 
tired of traveling, cold and hungry from much wading, and they at 
home had been lonesome, for they had seen no stranger for half a 
year. They had long been worrying over our prolonged absence 
and had begun to think we were never going to return. 

We found it impossible to get our sledge ashore at the harbor 
and had to land it on the sand spit three miles directly north of our 
home camp. We left Natkusiak and Palaiyak there to take care of 
the dogs. Palaiyak had brought with him a shotgun (Natkusiak 
and I had on our long trip carried nothing but rifles, for shotgun 
ammunition is too heavy to carry on such journeys as ours had 
been), and there was an abundance of ducks and geese for them to 
hunt. I took Palaiyak's kayak, and Ilavinirk and I paddled ashore 
to spend hours on end in talking about the varied things that had 
happened both to them and to us since we last met, and then we 
went to sleep peacefully under the protection of our good mosquito 
nets. 

Ilavinirk, like most of the western Eskimo, was not of much ac- 
count as a traveling companion because of general timidity and 
particular fear of new places. He was always afraid of starvation, 
always afraid that if we went into any place where none of his country- 
men had been before we should find no food animals to live on. This 







■jgaM&wrfiiwSibi'"'^' 



Drying Clothes and Ethnological Specimens aftek Traveling over Water- 
covered Ice. 




The Cache. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 327 

was his weak point — that was why we had to set him to the work of 
taking care of our base camp, for which task he was admirably 
adapted. He not only took excellent care of everything, but his 
memory was so good that he always knew not only exactly where 
everything was, but also how much there was of it and in what con- 
dition it was. He was conscientious about everything and never 
idle. We had particularly impressed him with the scientific value of 
the grizzly bear and with the importance of taking the appropriate 
measurements of the animal before it was skinned. He had accord- 
ingly secured for us three excellent specimens, which were not only 
properly skinned and preserved, but of which by means of knotted 
strings he had also taken the necessary measurements. He had, too, 
during the winter shot a silver fox, which is an animal common enough 
in the fur markets, but almost absent in the scientific collections 
of museums. Besides these two most important things he had taken 
and preserved the skins of various animals and birds, but best of 
all, from my point of view at least, he had made an important archaeo- 
logical discovery. 

I remember well, when I was in college listening to lectures on 
North American archaeology and ethnology, that our professor told 
us substantially the following about the occurrence of pottery among 
the Eskimo. Pottery, he said, was fairly abundant among the 
Eskimo south of the Yukon River of Alaska, and there was a little 
also north of the mouth of the Yukon, but it was very crude. He 
considered the northern limit of the art of pottery making to have 
been at the foot of Kotzebue Sound. True enough, Murdoch had 
brought back in 1882 two or three fragments of pottery from Point 
Barrow, but it seemed likely to our lecturer that these might have 
been brought to Point Barrow as articles of trade from Kotzebue 
Sound, and that the real knowledge of pottery making did not go 
quite so far. In any case this was, our professor considered, evidence 
of the fact that the Eskimo had come into Alaska from the east 
along the coast. They had come ignorant of the potter's art, and 
the advance guard of them when they met the Indians in the neighbor- 
hood of or south of the Yukon had learned the art from the Indians, 
and it had begun to spread eastward (upstream, as it were, against the 
current of migration) but had never penetrated farther east than 



328 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Kotzebue Sound, or to Point Barrow at the utmost. So much for 
the knowledge of pottery among the Eskimo as I acquired it in my 
university days. Practically this was the state of information on the 
subject among anthropologists, although I believe Murdoch himself 
considered the pottery he had found at Point Barrow had really 
been made there. 

Ilavinirk was a native of Kotzebue Sound and had often seen his 
own mother make pottery. He now told me that some twelve or 
fifteen miles northeast of Langton Bay, at the mouth of the river 
located behind what is known to us as Point Stivens, he had seen in 
the mud along the river some fragments of pottery of the same kind 
that his mother used to make in Kotzebue Sound. 

I will here anticipate the results of our summer's work by saying 
that we eventually found pottery both at the place where it was 
first discovered by Ilavinirk and at other places in the same neigh- 
borhood and that we found it in great abundance. Not only was 
it abundant, but it was found as deep down as any of the hu- 
man remains we uncovered and was therefore evidently of equal 
antiquity with the earliest of them. In other words, the Eskimo 
when they came here (from the east no doubt) knew pottery making 
as well as they did at any later time. They had not learned it in 
Alaska in recent times, as the anthropologists had been thinking. 
Neither did this art until recently fall into decay among the Macken- 
zie River or Baillie Islands Eskimo (as we learned from inquiries), for 
there are still living at the Baillie Islands a few people who them- 
selves have helped to make pottery, and many who can remember 
their parents making it. 

I was of course anxious to begin the work of archaeological excava- 
tion at once after our arrival at Langton Bay, but the season was 
still a little early. The most promising place was the one discovered 
by Ilavinirk behind Point Stivens, and this we could not reach for 
some time because the ice prevented our launching our umiak. I 
therefore occupied the first week after our return home in writing 
letters and reports to forward to the Baillie Islands with our Eskimo, 
whom I decided to allow a little vacation. They had been so long 
without seeing any of their countrymen that they were anxious 
to make the trip to the Baillie Islands ninety miles to the westward 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 329 

to visit their friends for a few days, and to wait there for the hoped-for 
coming in of whaling vessels. This suited me very well, for while we 
did not expect any supplies we hoped for mail, and I was anxious to 
send letters out with information of what our work had been the year 
before and what our intentions were for the future. 

I. There are a number of old house ruins on the sand spit which forms 
the outer wall of the Langton Bay harbor. Although wood is abun- 
dant enough in these parts, most of the houses seem to have had their 
walls made of the bones of whales, especially of the vertebrae and 
skull bones. Although we did a considerable amount of work in dig- 
ging out these dwellings, we found but few things of importance ex- 
cept pottery fragments, which were so numerous that they showed 
conclusively that the clay pots of which these were the remnants 
could not have been imported. They must have been made in the 
neighborhood. 

It turned out that in all our digging during two summers, both 
near Langton Bay and Point Barrow, we never found an unbroken 
clay pot. I hoped for such a find at first, but it is easy to see on care- 
ful thought that a buried clay pot could not possibly remain whole 
in damp ground (and all ground up here is damp), for frozen earth, 
like ice, keeps cracking in cold weather ; and when the earth in which 
a pot is imbedded cracks, the pot will have to crack with it. The 
only fairly complete specimens we ever secured were surface finds — 
cooking vessels that had been placed by the mourners beside the 
grave of some dead woman. 




CHAPTER XXII 

(Y June 30th the ice had been driven out of sight from the 
main body of Frankhn Bay, although Langton Bay itself 
to the east of us was still ice-covered. Not until July 8th did 
we feel sure the bay behind Point Stivens was clear of ice, and it was 
then we set out in our skin boat to visit it, for here the archaeological 
work of the summer was to be done. We reached on the evening 
of July 9th the site of the ruins discovered by Ilavinirk and at once 
began digging. 

Although we learned later that some of these houses had been 
occupied about the time of the childhood of a woman still living at 
the Baillie Islands (who was about fifteen years old when Richardson 
came there in 1848), yet they had every appearance of great age, 
and the best-preserved rafters that were found in the earth near 
the surface could be picked to pieces with the fingers, so decayed 
were they. Farther down, the ground was frozen and everything 
was better preserved. 

It is one of the elements of uncertainty one has to face here that 
the degree of decay of a wooden, bone, or ivory object gives no idea 
of its age except one take careful account of many circumstances, only 
one of which is how deep down in the earth it was buried. I remember 
especially the finding of a spear shaft which was embedded in the 
earth at an angle of about 45°. I must have dug away some of the 
end of it without noticing anything at all, and lower down I found 
what resembled a bundle of wet brown paper that could by no means 
be made to hang together. Farther down still the shaft was like a 
partly decayed stick of wood, and below that it was but slightly de- 
cayed, while the lower end of it was so well preserved in the perpetual 
frost that it looked as if it might have been made a year or two ago. 
This shaft had been buried by the caving in of a house, evidently. 
Had I taken samples of the upper and the lower end of this shaft 
and exhibited them together, without comment, any one would 

330 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 331 

have thought that there might have been a difference of from one 
to several centuries in time between the two pieces. 

I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of the story which places 
the latest occupation of this village site at something like eighty or 
ninety years ago, but I am inclined to think that the house ruins which 
actually exist are much older than that. The river on the banks of 
which they are located is gradually meandering southward and has 
cut away already a portion of the village site. It is not improbable 
that it may have carried away entirely the recent houses of v/hich our 
informants told us, and that these which we excavated are really 
much more ancient ones. I am inclined to this view especially from 
the fact, as stated elsewhere, that I have seen wood chopped by 
Richardson's party in 1848 which looks for all the world as if it might 
have been chopped only three or four years ago, while every stick in 
this site was thoroughly rotten unless it was deep in the frozen earth. 

I have omitted mentioning that when we returned home from 
Langton Bay we found there not only the four Eskimo who 
constituted Ilavinirk's family, but also a young man by the name 
of Mangilanna, a younger brother of the Tannaumirk who was work- 
ing for us and whom I had left in Dr. Anderson's party at Coronation 
Gulf. The day after reaching the river mouth at Point Stivens I 
sent Ilavinirk, Natkusiak and this Mangilanna with the umiak up the 
river towards Darnley Bay to fetch the goods which we had cached 
there two weeks before. This is a little river about thirty miles long, 
the mouth of which occupies the same place as the fictitious four or five 
hundred mile long River La Ronciere of the maps. The stream rises 
in the Melvill mountains south of Darnley Bay and flows through the 
lake of which we have spoken as the one over which we had made such 
a dangerous crossing immediately after leaving Darnley Bay. This 
river therefore furnishes a water route from Franklin Bay to within 
half a mile of Darnley Bay. It was only a matter of two or three 
days until the umiak had returned to us again, bringing the stuff 
we had left behind. 

For about two weeks we worked energetically at the task of ex- 
cavating this old village site which to the Baillie Islands Eskimo is 
known by the name of Kugum Panga, which being translated 
means merely "the mouth of the river." Besides finding a bushel or 



332 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

so of pottery fragments we found missile points, knives, and other 
articles of slate and "flint," pieces of iron pyrite that had been used 
for fire making, and various articles of whalebone, antler, and ivory. 
The ivory was very rare, for in that day no doubt as well as in this 
it had to be imported from Point Barrow or beyond. 

Besides showing us that pottery had been commonly used, these 
excavations threw many an interesting side light on the character of 
the people who had once occupied the land ; but nothing perhaps was 
so striking as the complete absence of fish-nets and all other articles 
associated with the art of netting fish. There were not any floats or 
sinkers and none of the peculiar tools which the Eskimo use in Alaska 
for regulating the size of the mesh. 

Using these facts as a basis of inquiry, we later on found that the 
same Baillie Islands woman (Pannigiok) whom we mentioned above 
as having been about fifteen when she saw Richardson in 1848, told us 
that she had been born near Langton Bay and had never seen nets in 
her own community, though she had heard some talk about their being 
in use to the westward. She had seen the first fish-net when at the age 
of eight or ten years she moved with her parents to the Baillie Islands. 
This was at a time, she told us, when the people of Langton Bay had 
for several years sufi^ered from scarcity of food, and the community 
to which she belonged had divided up, some moving east along the 
coast while she and her people moved west. Since then, she said, 
the people who went east have never returned or been heard from. 
This is probably an accurate, truthful account of the breaking up of 
the continuous chain of habitation that once stretched eastward along 
the coast to Coronation Gulf and of which we had found evidences 
everywhere along that coast in the shape of house ruins and graves. 
In ancient times it had been in a way necessary that people should 
occupy the whole coast for the purpose of trading, bringing the 
valuable stone lamps and stone pots and copper implements from the 
east and (in later days at least, and possibly even long ago) receiving 
from the west iron and other white men's or Asiatic wares that came 
by prehistoric trade routes across Bering Straits and eastward along 
the coast. 

By July 23d we began to fear, because the sea had been open so 
long, that whaling ships might arrive at the Baillie Islands any day ; 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 333 

and we accordingly set sail from Point Stivens for Langton Bay with 
the archaeological plunder we had been able to secure. Of course 
we had been able to dig up but a small portion of the very rich 
village site on which we had been working, but our "finds," such 
as they were, had in more than one way their aspects of great 
significance. 

On the way south we happened to pick up a polar bear that 
was wandering about on shore. A day or two before that Palaiyak 
and Mangilanna had secured a young grizzly bear, and a day or two 
after Palaiyak got another one in the Melvill Mountains south of 
Langton Bay. In general, however, at this time we lived on the 
meat of the bearded seal, which the boys Palaiyak and Mangilanna 
secured by paddling out to sea in their kayaks and shooting the 
seals as they slept on floating cakes of ice. 

July 27th Ilavinirk, Natkusiak, and Mangilanna with our umiak 
started west to the Baillie Islands, while I remained behind doing 
archaeological work around Langton Bay with the intermittent 
assistance of Palaiyak, Mamayauk, and Nogasak. In general, as I 
have had many occasions to point out, Nogasak was a very lazy and 
useless sort of person ; but scratching around in the ground with the 
prospect of finding spear points or knives was something that ap- 
pealed to her, and she really was my most valuable assistant through- 
out the entire summer in the work of excavating. I am inclined to 
think the main reason may have been that I discouraged her from the 
first, for fear that she might damage through carelessness some im- 
portant find that she made. She was therefore very careful, and 
whenever she found a sign of anything she would come to me and 
tell me about it before she finally dug it up. It would no doubt 
have been more desirable had I had the means of employing expert 
diggers who would have done everything according to the book, 
but as it was it seemed to be much more useful that Nogasak should 
find things in the wrong way than that they should remain buried 
and probably unfound forever. 

The time had now come when the caribou might be expected to 
have a little fat on their backs and the skins were becoming suitable 
for clothing. Altogether, myself and various members of our party 
had killed only half a dozen or so caribou since we came back to 



334 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Langton Bay, and the skins of all of them had been of little use, for they 
were full of large holes made by the escaping grubs of the bot-fly 
which had been growing under the hides of the poor animals' backs 
all winter and which had now just come out of their warm quarters 
and taken wing. The hair also is rather too short until towards the 
end of July, but from that time until the 20th of September it is in 
excellent condition for clothing, after which it becomes too long. 

It is not only the length of hair which is right in the month of 
August, but also the thickness of the hide itself. From Christmas 
time until May the skin is as thin as parchment and there is very 
little strength to it. In June it begins to thicken, but is as yet 
full of bot-fly holes. Towards the end of July these holes heal up and 
the skin becomes of the right thickness, while by October it has be- 
come too thick and unpliable for use as clothing. For that reason 
we use the hides of ordinary animals taken in September and October 
for clothing only in emergencies, and otherwise utilize them for bedding 
only, except the skins of the old bull caribou, which have often 
the thickness of sole leather and which we accordingly use for boot 
soles for our winter footwear. 

It was because we knew the caribou were getting into condition 
and because we had to " take thought for the morrow " in the matter of 
clothing for winter that we set out on July 30th southward to look 
for caribou. 

The Endicott Mountains look like mountains true enough as 
seen from the sea, but when in the three-mile walk inland you have 
climbed up two thousand feet or so you find yourself on a fairly level 
table-land, although within three miles from the sea the streams 
begin to flow inland towards Horton River, which lies about fifteen 
miles away, parallel to the coast. 

Soon after I reached the top of this plateau and about five miles 
from camp I came upon a grizzly bear accompanied by two small 
cubs. I did not realize how small the cubs were at first and shot the 
old animal and one of the cubs. On closer approach I saw that the 
living animal was but the size of a wolverine and showed no fear or 
concern of me whatever. It occurred to me then that it would be 
a very interesting thing to take the thing alive ; but unfortunately 
I did not have any string with me or other means of taking the cub 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 335 

along to the coast. I therefore returned home and immediately 
hitched our dogs to a sled, with which and an empty box we started 
to fetch the bear. It was a matter of eight or ten hours until we 
got to where I had left the cub behind ; but although he had not 
been afraid of me then, the poor fellow had by now evidently real- 
ized the death of his two relatives, and we were at least half a mile 
away when he saw us and took to his heels. I followed him a con- 
siderable distance while the others skinned the two dead bears, but I 
never got anywhere near him. 

With me the matter of big game hunting is another case of " swords 
sticking to hands that seek the plow." I am afraid I am not a true 
sportsman. It is impossible for me to get enjoyment out of the killing 
of animals (and as for that, if I did I should get a job in the Chicago 
stockyards rather than follow poor frightened wild things around 
with a rifle). It is mere nonsense to talk of wild animals (in the case 
of those on the continent of North America at least) having a chance 
for their lives against the hunter. They all give us as wide a berth 
as they can; their only desire and hope of safety is in hiding or in 
flight. None of them, so far as my experience goes, will fight unless 
wounded or cornered, or in the defence of their helpless young. 
No matter how well they are provided by nature with claws and teeth 
and stout muscles, they have no more chance against a man with a 
modern rifle than a fly has against a sledge hammer. 

Unfortunately the Barren Ground grizzly is a priceless thing scien- 
tifically. There are practically none of them in museums and one 
of our avowed objects in coming North was to get some. I never 
allowed any to pass, therefore, and I shot altogether thirteen, but 
somehow the killing of these poor animals affected me more than that 
of any others. They are provided by nature with a fighting equip- 
ment second to no animal on the continent, and yet they try their 
best to live peacefully and inoffensively. They feed on roots almost 
entirely, and whenever they discover the sign of a human being, 
whether they see or smell his footprints, or see him or get his wind, 
they immediately use every means in their power to get out of the 
way. But they are dull of sight and not very quick of hearing and 
when the hunter once sees them there is no escape. 

August 8th Palaiyak hunted to the south also and shot three deer 



336 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

about five miles away from camp. We were about to set out to fetch 
the meat of them when a sail appeared to the north which our glasses 
told us was Captain Bernard's Teddy Bear. It was reasonable enough 
she should arrive just then, although we had not expected her for a 
week or so yet. 

The Teddy Bear dropped anchor in the harbor late in the afternoon 
of August 9th, bringing Dr. Anderson, Tannaumirk, and Pannigabluk, 
all safe. Spring had been very early in Coronation Gulf, and they 
really could have come out sooner than they did. Cruising up along 
the southwest coast of Victoria Island they had found our beacon 
on Bell Island and had thereby, as we intended, been saved from 
the trip to Banks Island to look for us. 

I was very confident that we would be able in the neighborhood 
of Langton Bay to kill caribou and grizzly bears enough for our food 
the coming winter, but our Eskimo knew very well that their country- 
men at the Baillie Islands, less than a hundred miles to the westward, 
would have plenty of flour, tea, and things of that sort, and we felt 
they would not be content with us unless they had it also. Captain 
Bernard had a considerable stock of these things and kindly fur- 
nished us with a supply. Dr. Anderson and I are not particular 
about such luxuries as flour and sugar, but our Eskimo had no scientific 
interests to keep them in the country, and, like servants everywhere, 
wanted as high wages and as good food as possible. So of course we 
had to supply them with what we could get in the way of imported 
food. 

It is not really so much that these Eskimo regard baking powder 
bread as such excellent food, but it is rather that they know it is 
expensive and they are human enough to want to have their neighbors 
know that they can afford to have this and that to eat even if it does 
cost money, differing not so much from the rest of humanity in that 
matter. They judge things chiefly by price, and desire them in pro- 
portion to their current market value. 

Dr. Anderson was anxious to communicate with the whaling ships 
if possible for the purpose of sending out mail and for other reasons, 
and so he continued west with the Teddy Bear toward the Baillie 
Islands with the intention of returning thence with Ilavinirk and Nat- 
kusiak in our umiak, while Tannaumirk and Pannigabluk came ashore 



MY LIFE ^ WITH THE ESKIMO 337 

and joined us. As the caribou season was now at its best we stayed 
around Langton Bay only a few hours after the Teddy Bear left and 
then started inland in the search for game. 

As we have pointed out elsewhere, the caribou hunt is not merely \ 
to secure meat. A supply of dried venison to tide you over the sunless 
days helps you to face the season with confidence, but the main con- 
sideration is to secure skins for clothing against the winter. Our 
method of hunting is in general that we travel from one high hill to 
another high hill, pause on each hilltop and with our field glasses and 
telescopes carefully examine every inch of visible ground in the hope 
of seeing caribou. 

On these summer hunts the dogs are equipped with pack saddles, 
consisting essentially of two big pouches that nearly reach to the 
ground on either side of the animal when the pack is in place. These 
pack saddles are loaded with the heaviest and least bulky things we 
have to carry. A fifty-pound dog will carry a forty-pound pack or 
even a heavier one, and he will carry it all day, although his walking 
gait is rather slow, perhaps not much over two miles an hour. The 
people of the party will carry on their backs the bulky things, such 
as the bedding, tents, and cooking utensils. A man does not carry 
more than thirty or forty pounds, although under special conditions 
he may carry as much as a hundred and fifty or even two hundred. 

When caribou are discovered, the women and children, if there are 
any in the party, stop and make camp, while the men secure the 
caribou, skin them, and cut them up. Usually long before the 
skinning is done camp has been made ; and if the caribou are located 
so near that the women know the killing has actually taken place, they 
come with the dogs to help bring home the meat ; or if a considerable 
number of caribou are killed, it may be easier than moving the meat to 
camp to move the camp up to the scene of the slaughter. The meat is 
then cut up into thin strips and spread out on the ground or on stones 
to dry ; or if there are sticks available a frame is made over which the 
meat is hung up. The skins too are spread out to dry. The process 
of drying meat delays camp moving, so the men go out and hunt 
for more caribou in all directions from the camp ; and if they secure 
any they usually bring home the meat, unless indeed they make a 
big killing, in which case it is easier to transport the half-dried meat 



338 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

and the camp gear to the deer kill than to bring home the fresh meat to 
camp. Then whenever the meat is dried and if no more caribou are 
likely to be found in that immediate vicinity, the meat is cached in 
the safest way possible, usually by stones being piled on top of it, and 
the party moves on, carrying with it the dried caribou skins, for they 
are too precious to leave behind to the uncertain safety of a cache. 
The same kind of traveling as before is resumed as soon as all the 
meat killable in any locality has been turned into dry meat, the 
party marching from hilltop to hilltop and continually looking for 
game, which is finally found. And then the same process repeats 
itself. 

On the particular hunt under discussion the caribou were not 
very numerous. First we went about fifteen miles south from 
Langton Bay to the head of a small wooded creek that runs into 
Horton River from the north, and here during the course of a 
week we killed about a dozen caribou and three grizzly bears. The 
Eskimo generally merely wind-dry the meat, but personally I rather 
prefer the Indian method of smoke-drying it, and so we built a spruce 
bough lodge in the Indian style and dried the meat that way. This 
has an additional advantage, for when you want to leave for another 
hunting camp you can with tolerable safety cache anything you 
want inside of the abandoned lodge, for the smoke smell, while it is at 
all fresh, will keep beasts of prey at a distance. Eventually, of 
course (in a fortnight or so), some wolverine will become contemptu- 
ous enough of the fire smell which it at first dreaded, and will venture 
into the deserted house to steal. 

We remained about a week in the camp on the wooded creek-head 
where we had made our first kill, and then we were forced to leave it 
on account of the absence of caribou in that neighborhood, and by 
the fact that I one day happened to kill four animals a long way to 
the eastward in a country where game signs were more numerous. 
Moving to these better pastures was a matter of nearly a day's walk, 
for we traveled heavy laden with the caribou fat and skins that 
were too precious to risk leaving behind with the meat. Traveling 
at this time of year is particularly pleasant, for while the days are still 
warm, the placid nights are cool and the power of the mosquito has 
been broken. There are few things in one's experience in the North 



.r":^' 










-^ 






The AIahch a(.'hoss Barren Ground. 



••■«i 




_^-*,^ ^,_'->-. 




♦•rXj.v'' •■*' 



">*» ^' 






^ *.?/rrS3 



Camp Breaking and Preparing Packs for Travel. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 339 

that are so pleasant to remember as these autumn hunts, when the 
camp is pitched among a clump of spruce trees at the bottom of some 
ravine^ and when at the end of a day's hunt you can gather around a 
crackling fire in the enveloping darkness, for the four-months' summer 
day is just over. The occasional howl of a wolf in the near shadow 
lends an additional romance, especially if, as not seldom happens, 
the wolves are so numerous and near that the dogs become frightened 
and gather in a close circle around the fire. Few meals can be more 
satisfying, either, at the end of a hard day's work, than a caribou head 
that has been rotated continuously before the fire until it is roasted 
through, even to the base of the tongue and the center of the brain. 
The dreams of boyhood seldom come true, but I am not sure that there 
is not sometimes as much romance about the reality of such evenings 
as there was about the dreams of Crusoe-like adventures on desert 
islands. 

As the nights grew longer and the weather colder we gradually 
worked our way south to the place where in December, 1910, I had 
hoped to find Dr. Anderson and his companions when Natkusiak, 
the Slavey Indian, and I were on our way north from Great Bear 
Lake. My parting injunction to Dr. Anderson in March, 1910, had 
been that he should if possible winter on the head of Coal Creek ; and 
when we came from the south and found that he was not there, it 
had been a disappointment not only because the fear of starvation 
was upon us, but also because it seemed to me such a picturesque 
spot in which to spend the winter — so promising in the comfort of 
the deep spruce-wooded valley and in the resources of the fishing lake 
at the head of the creek, where we had always found the caribou 
plentiful whenever we sought them the winter before (1909-1910). 
Since Dr. Anderson did not settle there when he was in charge in 
1910 I was going to see to it now that in 1911 we should ; and accord- 
ingly on September 16th we moved camp down into the bottom 
lands of Coal Creek, about half a mile east from Horton River, at a 
place where I intended we should build our winter house. The 
following day, September 17th, Dr. Anderson and Ilavinirk arrived 
from Baillie Islands, so that we now had a force of men sufficient to 
build a house in a hurry. 



D 



CHAPTER XXIII 

R. ANDERSON brought the news that Natkusiak had left our 
service. It seemed that a man at the Bailhe Islands named 
Kutukak had made up his mind that Natkusiak would be a 
desirable son-in-law (about which there could be no reasonable doubt, 
for a more competent man in everything which concerns making a 
living in the Arctic could not possibly be found in that community). 
Natkusiak had accordingly joined Kutukak's family as his son-in-law, 
and they had gone off to Liverpool Bay, where they intended to spend 
the autumn. This was a very disappointing piece of news, for in all 
my long travels and in everything of difficulty which I had had to 
undertake in the past three years, Natkusiak had always been my 
mainstay and in many cases the only man on whom I could rely. 
But while this about him was disappointing intelligence, news of 
another sort quite took it out of my mind. 

When Dr. Anderson told it to me first, the thing seemed quite 
beyond belief. He had learned at the Baillie Islands that In- 
spector Fitzgerald and three mounted policemen under his com- 
mand had starved to death on the ordinarily very simple journey 
from Fort Macpherson south to Dawson with the winter mail. 
Fitzgerald and two of his companions, Kinney and Carter, I knew 
personally. The news struck me like a blow. There were many 
aspects of it, but the most personal one was that the last conver- 
sation I had had with Fitzgerald was one in which he told me his 
thorough disapprobation of my methods of travel, and that if I tried 
to follow them I should surely come to grief. And here were we in 
comfort and in plenty listening to the story of his tragic death. 

He had been a man of great courage, as were all of his companions ; 
but they had failed through the essential weakness of their system 
of travel, which was to take with them all the food which they thought 
they could possibly need on the journey, without making any prep- 
arations for gathering more from the country when their stores 

340 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 341 

should become exhausted. The result was in that case, as it has been 
in so many others, that when unlooked-for circumstances stretched 
the time of the journey beyond the limit reckoned on at first, supplies 
ran out ; the dogs were eaten, then the men's skin clothing and the 
harness of the dogs ; and then came death through cold and starvation. 

It is always easy to see when a tragedy has happened how it 
could have been avoided, but it has always seemed to me that so 
long as you are traveling in a country supplied with game, you are 
safer to start with a rifle and with the resolution to find food (but 
without a pound of food on your sled), than you would be in starting 
with a sled heavily loaded with food and with no provision made 
for getting more when the sled load has been eaten up. 

But perhaps more startling than this story of death among harsh 
circumstances was the further news that Sergeant Selig, whom 
both Dr. Anderson and I knew personally and a man from whom we 
had received much kindness, had been left in good health and com- 
fort by Inspector Fitzgerald at Herschel Island and had died there 
from sudden illness long before the news reached him of Fitzgerald's 
death. Five out of the six policemen whom we had left at Herschel 
Island a little more than a year ago, comfortably housed amid 
plenty, were now all dead ; and new men had come to take their 
places. 

Various other items of news Dr. Anderson brought also, such as 
these : the Teddy Bear was going to winter at the Baillie Islands and 
so was Captain Wolki's whaling schooner, the Rosie H. Three or 
four whaling vessels had either touched at the Bailie Islands or had 
been seen to pass in the offing, and one of these, the Belvedere, under 
Captain Cottle, was going to winter at Herschel Island. 

Another piece of news VN^hich did not then bear the aspect of 
tragedy was that an Englishman, Hubert Darrell, had not reached 
Fort Macpherson after having visited the Baillie Islands in the fall of 
1910. When Dr. Anderson repeated this piece of news to me we 
discussed it and agreed, as we still do, that Darrell was a man who 
would not have starved under ordinary circumstances, and we 
therefore felt sure that he had turned up alive and well somewhere 
or other unless sickness or accident had overtaken him. Darrell 
was a man who understood thoroughly the principle of "doing 



342 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

in Rome as the Romans do," and he had on many occasions, to 
my knowledge, in the past apphed that principle so well that he 
was as safe as an Eskimo in his wanderings about the country; 
and really safer by far, for he had learned dll the Eskimo had to teach 
him, and added to that knowledge the superiority of the white man's 
trained mind, and a natural energy and resourcefulness that are rare 
among men of any race. 

Although it was not until a year later that we became certain 
that the travels of Da^rrell over the northland of Canada had come 
to a tragic ending, I shall insert here a brief sketch of the man and his 
work. He was one that did not advertise, and although some of the 
most wonderful journeys ever performed in Arctic lands were done by 
him, the world would probably never have heard much of them even 
had he lived a longer time. 

Darrell had come from England as a young man and owned a farm 
in Manitoba. I think it was the gold rush to the Yukon that first drew 
him thence to the North, although at that time he did not go much 
beyond Great Slave Lake, where he spent some time wdth the half- 
caste and Indian hunters and travelers. He had already learned 
their ways when David T. Hanbury came there in 1901 and induced 
Darrell to join him on a trip eastward from Slave Lake to Chesterfield 
Lilet. 

After spending the winter near Hudson Bay, a party consisting of 
Hanbury, Darrell, a third man named Sandy Ferguson, and about 
twenty Eskimo went inland, crossing north over Back's Great Fish 
River to the Arctic coast, following the coast west to the Coppermine 
River and ascending it to Dismal Lake, and there crossing over the 
divide which separates the waters of the Arctic Ocean from those of 
Great Bear Lake. Here the Eskimo turned back in August, and on 
their way home incidentally paid a visit to Captain Amundsen 
when he was wintering on King William Island, while the three 
white men proceeded by canoe across Great Bear Lake to the Mac- 
kenzie River. This was a journey of more than seven months in 
which the entire party had lived wholly on the country. It was 
Hanbury's last trip, but not so wdth Darrell. 

I met Darrell first at Shingle Point on the Arctic coast, just west 
of the Mackenzie River, when I was spending my first winter among 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 343 

the Eskimo (1906-1907), and when he was on his way guiding a 
party of mounted pohcemen from Herschel Island to Fort Macpher- 
son. That was always his way. He was about as new to that country 
as the policemen were, but still he was a competent guide, for he never 
lost his head, and after all, in most places in the North it is not 
difficult to find your way if you keep your wits about you. 

It was the winter before I saw him that he had made one of his 
most wonderful journeys. That winter Captain Amundsen with 
the Gjoa was wintering at King Point, halfway between the Mac- 
kenzie River and Herschel Island. In the fall of 1905 Captain Amund- 
sen, as the guest of some whalers, traveled south in their company 
across the Endicott Mountains to the Yukon. The whalers and 
Amundsen had several sleds, and Esldmo to do the housework and 
camp making, and they traveled over a well-known road, where it is 
only a matter of three or four days from the time you leave the last 
Eskimo camp on the north side of the divide, where you can any time 
purchase deer meat, condensed milk, flour, or any such article you 
think you may need, up to the time you come to the first Indian camp 
on the south side of the divide, where you can supply yourself with 
dried fish, venison, and other articles of food. Amundsen has of 
course never said a word to indicate that he considers this Alaskan 
journey he made a difficult one, which as a matter of fact it is not ; but 
the world at large insists upon considering it a marvelous feat, and the 
story, which the telegraphs and cables flashed all over the world, of 
the arduous road over which Amundsen had come to Eagle City, 
keeps echoing and reechoing in the speech of men and in the pages of 
magazines. 

That same winter Darrell also made a trip south from the Arctic 
Ocean to the Yukon. Instead of having whalemen for companions 
and Eskimo for guides, he went alone. Instead of having several 
teams and sledges, he had no dogs and only a small hand sledge which 
he pulled behind him ; and on that sledge he carried sixty pounds of 
mail. He made his way from Fort Macpherson over the mountains 
by a more difficult road than that followed by Amundsen's party. 
Although he traveled alone he had no adventures and no mishaps 
(adventures and mishaps seldom happen to a competent man), and 
when he arrived on the Yukon the telegraph despatches recorded 



344 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the simple fact that mail had arrived from the imprisoned whalers in 
the Beaufort Sea, and not a word of who had brought it or how it 
had been brought. 

On the Yukon Amundsen happened to meet Darrell. He recog- 
nized the feat for what it was — one of the most remarkable things 
ever done in Arctic lands. " With a crew of men like that," Amundsen 
says, "I could go to the moon." Although he no doubt never ex- 
pected to see him again, Captain Amundsen invited Darrell to visit 
him on the Gjoa at Shingle Point. Darrell does not seem to have 
agreed to this at once, and Amundsen returned with his party north 
to the coast, leaving Darrell behind on the Yukon. But one day 
towards early spring Darrell turned up at Amundsen's camp at King 
Point. He had come alone again over the mountains by a new route, 
and without adventure, as always. 

From the time I saw him guiding a party of mounted police in 
November, 1906, 1 did not see Darrell again until the summer of 1908, 
when I met him at Arctic Red River, the most northerly Hudson's 
Bay post on the Mackenzie River proper. In the meantime he had 
been making his quiet journeys alone, here and there through the 
north, and that fall I believe he crossed the mountains again to 
the Yukon. I do not know what his movements were from that 
on until the fall of 1910, when he appeared at the Eskimo village at 
the Baillie Islands, without dogs as usual, and dragging his sled behind 
him. The schooner Rosie H. was wintering there at the time, but 
Captain Wolki was away and the ship was under the command 
of her first officer, Harry Slate. 

To travel alone and without dogs is an unheard of thing even 
among the Eskimo, and both they and Mr. Slate tried first to get 
Darrell to stop over and next offered to give him some dogs to haul 
his sled, but both without avail. He was used to traveling that 
way, he said, and it would be too much bother to hitch up the dogs 
in the morning. He told them further, truly, that nothing would 
go wrong so long as no accident happened, and that to have dogs with 
him if an accident did happen would be of no particular use. 

Darrell had been with a canoe up Anderson River the previous 
summer and had left his camp near the mouth of the river at the foot 
of Liverpool Bay. In order to return there he started southwest 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 345 

from the Baillie Islands, and a few days later he met some Eskimo 
by whom he sent a letter to Mr. Slate. At first Darrell had intended 
to come and visit me (for our base at Langton Bay was only ninety 
miles east of the Baillie Islands), but Slate had told him that I would 
not be at home, and only Ilavinirk's family were keeping the 
camp for me. He had therefore decided not to come. The letter 
he wrote Mr. Slate, which contains some messages to me, is the last 
positive thing we know of Darrell. In it he says, as he had already 
told Slate, that he intended to go the three hundred miles or so to Fort 
Macpherson and thence across the mountains to Dawson, and in- 
tended to return the next year. Eskimo information makes it clear 
that he left his camp in Liverpool Bay, but in what direction he 
went we do not know. Personally, in making such a journey, I 
should have traveled along the coast ; but Darrell was used to the 
woodlands, and certainly the woods are an advantage in a way, 
although the snow is soft among the trees. It may be that he tried 
to go straight overland through the forested area from Liverpool 
Bay to Fort Macpherson. It is also possible that he may at the 
last moment, because of approaching sickness or for some other reason, 
have taken to the ice of the Anderson River with the idea of reaching 
a camp of the Fort Good Hope Indians, who may be expected at one 
place or another after you get a hundred miles up the Anderson. 

The only thing discovered since Darrell was last seen that may 
possibly be a clew, is that some Eskimo told me at the Baillie Islands 
in March, 1912, that the previous summer they had been in a boat up 
the Anderson River and had seen a blazed tree with some writing 
upon it. As a good many of the Fort Good Hope Indians can read 
and write, the chances are that this is some of their scribbling. 
Nevertheless I advised the Eskimo if they went up to the place again 
to cut down the tree and bring the piece containing the writing 
down to Captain Wolki at the Baillie Islands. 

It is not likely we shall ever know what the ultimate end of 
Darrell was ; but whatever it was, those who knew him feel sure that 
he met it bravely and without heroics. 

When Dr. Anderson and Ilavinirk arrived, they came carrying 
pack loads from Langton Bay, for the snow had not yet come ; but 
before they had been with us more than a day or two we had a heavy 



346 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

fall of snow which seemed to indicate that winter had begun. Some 
of the party therefore had to return the thirty or so miles to Langton 
Bay to fetch from our base there the sleds which we should need 
in our hunt for caribou in the early winter, while others had to work 
at the building of our house. 

Dr. Anderson volunteered to go get the sleds from the seacoast, 
and it was decided that all but two of the Eskimo should accompany 
him, for there was heavy work involved. But before they started 
we all put in two days in building a house frame and in sodding 
it over roughly. The sodding was so poorly done that we later 
on had to do it all over again. The building was a simple affair. 
There were a pair of vertical posts about twenty feet apart and 
nine feet high, across the tops of which a ridgepole was laid. An 
essential feature of the walls was that they were not vertical, but 
sloped in, so that earth, no matter how carelessly it was thrown 
against the house, would fit in and not cave away as commonly 
happens when you try to build vertical walled houses in white men's 
fashion. 

It is hard to say why it is, but some white man seem to feel there 
is something vulgar or degrading about a house wall that is not verti- 
cal, and everywhere on the Arctic coast you find white men trying to 
build warm houses by sodding up the outside of a vertical wall. 
The thing always fails, for the sod is sure to leave an open space 
between itself and the wall — a thing that need not happen in the 
prairie provinces of Canada (out of the sods of which I have seen warm 
houses built), but which is bound to happen in the Arctic where " sod " 
is but another name for loose earth. 

When our house was built it was comfortable enough and a 
cheerful place. We left a square hole in the roof and under this we 
built a fire. Dr. Anderson and I would have preferred that this 
should be our heating system for the whole winter, for to white men 
there is something cheerful and homelike about a crackling fire. Not 
so with the Eskimo. For thousands of years their ancestors before 
them have never built any big fires, and it seems that the charm of a 
fire, so instinctively felt by a white man, is an incomprehensible idea 
to the Eskimo. They knew about sheet-iron stoves, one of which 
we had down on the seacoast, and it was beyond their comprehension 




5 W 

o 



in 'zr 

< 2 



a" Ph 

O K 






o tf 






MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 347 

how any man could want to have an open fire if he could have a sheet- 
iron stove. I explained to them that the high and mighty of our 
land, who could perfectly well afford sheet-iron stoves, much prefer 
open fires. In connection with this I think they had an opinion 
of me to the effect that while I was fairly reliable in everyday matters, 
I had a sort of amiable weakness which led me to misrepresent my 
countrymen and to make them out far sillier than they really are. 

When the house had been built and the sleds fetched from the sea- 
coast we gathered together, from the various places where we had 
left them behind, our stores of dried caribou and grizzly bear 
meat. We also prospected the country about in search of fishing 
lakes, and found that the most promising was the one in which Coal 
Creek heads, and which lies about six miles east of Horton River. 
This lake was five or six miles long and perhaps two miles wide at the 
widest part, and seemed to be well supplied with fresh-water trout 
and fresh-water cod. In the summer it had also been full of Back's 
greyling, bluefish, or Arctic trout (as they are variously called), but 
all of these seemed to have run out of the lake through Coal Creek 
to Horton River, about the time of the freeze-up. 

The freeze-up, by the way, was far slower the fall of 1911 than in 
other years which we have spent in the Arctic. The earliest coming 
of frost experienced by us was the fall of 1908, when small lakes were 
thickly covered with ice on September 6th and the freezing of the 
sheltered portion of the sea began on that date. In 1911 we had a 
heavy rain as late as the 21st of October. Shallow lakes had been 
frozen before that, and also the quieter strips of Horton River; 
the rain was heavy enough to break the ice off the river, although it 
did not destroy the thicker ice of the small lakes. The deeper 
lakes had not been frozen at all before the warmer spell of which this 
late October rain was but one feature, and it was the beginning of 
November before the deepest of them were finally frozen over. We 
learned later that at various points on the coast it was late in Novem- 
ber before the ocean was finally frozen, which was two months later 
than ordinary. 

It seemed the first part of October that the caribou, which had 
been so numerous around Coal Creek in 1909-1910, were now not going 
to come at all. We made long hunts in various directions in vain. 



348 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

There were not even any tracks to be seen. The ptarmigan were 
numerous, however, and we shot a good many of them, for our camp 
was this time so near our base at Langton Bay that we could afford 
to haul shotgun ammunition to it. The fishing was also turning out 
fairly well. We had three short nets in which we took from twenty 
to seventy-five pounds per day. This was not quite as much as we 
were eating, of course, for there were ten of us and fifteen dogs, so our 
dry meat stores from the summer began to dwindle. 

I quite agree with Hanbury when he says that there is no way of 
telling about caribou migrations — when they will come or just where 
they will pass. It is a certain thing, however, that the time at which 
the freeze-up of the lakes and rivers occurs with reference to the first 
coming of the autumn has a marked influence on the direction of 
migration. It is no doubt the change in the quality of food, brought 
about by a change of weather, which makes caribou restless where 
they are and induces them to start out in search of better pastures ; 
and when they have once started migrating they will cross a lake 
that they find frozen over and be deflected to the right or left by 
another which they find open. The result is that an exceptionally 
early or an exceptionally late freeze-up may throw the migration into 
a track this year that is far removed from the track of last year. 
We supposed, and no doubt it was true, that the lateness of the 
autumn of 1911 was in part responsible for the caribou not turning 
up as early as we had expected. 

On October 27th our luck turned. During previous years I had 
been in the habit of doing most of the shooting for our party, but this 
year there were so many other able-bodied hunters in camp that 
I had decided to leave the hunting to them and devote my time to 
linguistic work, to the recording of Eskimo folk-lore in the original 
language, and the writing up of grammatical notes. It therefore fell 
to Tannaumirk to make the first discovery of caribou. He had gone 
eight or ten miles southeast and had seen one bull, but had de- 
cided not to approach him because of the absence of wind and the 
probability of being heard before he had come within shooting dis- 
tance. The following day Palaiyak and Tannaumirk together went 
to look for this bull, but found instead a band of eight cows and calves, 
of which they were able to secure only one cow. After the shoot- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 349 

ing they followed the band for ten or more miles east and saw a 
great many tracks of caribou apparently moving south. 

This was a time for letting linguistics go by the board for a day or 
two, for the fall caribou migration seemed to be beginning, and so all of 
us hunted the next day. Dr. Anderson went southeast, saw eight 
caribou and got five of them — two cows, two calves, and a young bull. 
I hunted first northeast, then east, and later southeast, a distance of 
perhaps twenty miles, and finally saw about a hundred caribou, but 
too late in the day to be able to do much about it. When I saw them 
first it was about an hour before sundown, and it was a good eight 
miles to go to reach the neighborhood of where they were, so that it 
was already half an hour after sundown when I got my first shot. 
I got four animals only, for it was getting dark and I could not follow 
them up. The next day Dr. Anderson and Tannaumirk fetched the 
meat of the five deer Dr. Anderson had killed and succeeded in getting 
two more. Palaiyak and I went to get the meat of those shot by me 
and killed three on the way. Ilavinirk went to tend the fish-nets and 
near the lake saw some caribou of which he secured two. 

On the face of it, this seemed a good beginning, but it was really a 
wrong beginning ; for the caribou apparently were coming from the 
southeast in a direction straight for our camp and had we waited a 
day or two they would have been all around us. As it was we had 
gone to meet them so far that we had seen them only towards dark 
each day and had not been able to make a good killing at any time, 
while the few we had killed were scattered in a semicircle ten or 
twelve miles in extent, which blocked the further advance of the mi- 
gration towards us ; for when the main body of the caribou got that 
far, the ground was crisscrossed with our snow-shoe tracks and the 
air was everywhere tainted with the smell of the animals that had 
been killed and cut up. This fence of disagreeable sights and smells 
turned the migration so that it never came any nearer to us. We 
did not fully realize at once that it was not coming nearer, and we 
did not therefore hunt as energetically as we might. We kept getting 
a few stray animals, however, until a total of about forty had been 
secured. 

The year before on our journey up Horton River we had been 
forced to abandon one of our sledges and about a hundred pounds of 



350 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

gear up Horton River, half way between Langton Bay and Great 
Bear Lake. We now decided to go to fetch these things, partly be- 
cause we wanted the sled, and also because we were anxious to make 
a geological collection along the river. We had, true enough, picked 
up specimens here and there on the way south the year before, but 
the difficulties of transportation had limited us both in the number 
and the size of the specimens, and we saw our chance now to sup- 
plement them. Accordingly on November 9th, Dr. Anderson, Tan- 
naumirk, and I started up the river, and on December 15th we 
reached the place where the sled had been abandoned. 

On the way south we saw, about twenty miles southeast of our 
camp, a considerable number of caribou and a great number of 
tracks, but we made no special effort to get them. In the same 
district on the way home w^e again saw a few tracks, though not so 
many as when we went south. Evidently the caribou were keep- 
ing pretty well to the east of us and chiefly, as I have no doubt, for 
the reason assigned above, that we had stopped their westward 
migration by the line of deer kills which were a line of danger signals 
that beckoned them away from the neighborhood of our camp. 
November 20th we were home at our base camp again from this brief 
up-river excursion, with a sled load of articles cached the year 
before, and with a representative collection of rock specimens from 
the various precipices and gorges along Horton River. 
p The chief interest in life among the civilized Eskimo in winter 
is trapping fur. This was an interest of ours also, because we 
were anxious to secure wolf, wolverine, and fox skins for mu- 
seum specimens. It had accordingly been our arrangement on 
hiring our Eskimo that we pay them not only $200 a year in money 
or its equivalent (for the North Alaskans well understood the use of 
money), but we had also agreed with them that whenever w^e had 
nothing else for them to do they were to be free to trap, and half of 
what they got should belong to them. Trapping around Coal 
Creek had been poor and only something like thirty skins altogether 
had been secured of foxes (white, red, and cross), wolves, and 
wolverines. There was a firm belief in our party that foxes were 
abundant down on the seacoast, and a strong desire therefore to move 
to the sea for the purpose of trapping. This did not suit me at all. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 351 

I much preferred living in the wooded and well-sheltered creek 
bottom where our house stood to trapping foxes along the barren 
and shelterless coast of Langton Bay, but in order to keep peace 
in the family I finally agreeed that some of our party should go 
down and try the trapping. Accordingly Ilavinirk's family and 
myself crossed the Melvill Mountains to Langton Bay, leaving 
the others behind on Horton River. 

The same whale carcass which had been so useful to us the year 
before was still lying stranded on the beach west of Langton Bay. 
It had been about two miles west of the harbor the year before, but the 
past summer the waves had moved it about a mile nearer to our 
storehouse. Within a day or two from getting down to the coast we 
caught six white foxes near this carcass, but after that no more; 
and there was not a track to be seen. 

This failure of our trapping even in the neighborhood of a stranded 
whale gives us the text for discussing the peculiar habits of the Arctic 
fox. In summer the white fox is a land animal, but in winter ninety 
per cent of them probably go off on the sea ice and live parasitically, 
as it were, upon the fruits of the labor of the polar bear. Whenever 
you see the tracks of a bear in winter you are likely to see following 
them the tracks of anywhere from one to a dozen foxes. Here and 
there on the ocean seals and fish that died from natural causes are 
thrown up and are found by the keen scent of the foxes. Here and 
there also when the ice is being crushed up into pressure ridges a few 
fish are caught and killed by the tumbling blocks, and these the fox 
also tries to find. But this supply depends upon accident and is not 
what the fox really relies upon. His main dependence is the skill 
and energy of the polar bear as a seal hunter. If the bear has hard 
luck and kills only a seal in a great while, he may devour the whole 
animal, and the fox which follows behind will go hungry. But if 
the bear has any ordinary luck at all, he will kill off more seals than 
he needs and will eat only a small part of what he kills, leaving the 
rest. When he has dropped asleep near the remains of his feast or 
has gone ahead about his business, the foxes that have been dogging 
his footsteps come up and eat whatever is left. 

The polar bear can get seals only along the edge of open water. 
Certain years the winds are such that in the neighborhood of Cape 



352 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Parry, and elsewhere on the north coast of America, lanes of open 
water are only a few miles offshore. Those years there are plenty 
of polar bears around and consequently plenty of foxes also. The 
winter of 1911-1912 was exceptional apparently in ice conditions. 
None of our party ever went far out on the ice and I know of no one on 
the thousand-mile stretch between Cape Parry and Point Barrow who 
did, but knowing the habits of the bears and the foxes, it seems to me 
evident that there could have been no open water anywhere near 
shore, for the year was remarkable above all others to which the 
memory of the Eskimo in Alaska and the white traders extended, 
in the almost complete absence from the whole coast line from Novem- 
ber until late March of both polar bears and foxes. At the Baillie 
Islands, for instance, energetic Eskimo trappers that habitually 
get two hundred foxes in winter had caught less than ten by the end 
of March. This was a universal calamity, comparable to a drought in 
a farming district, for the game upon which the Eskimo formerly lived 
has been destroyed throughout this entire district by the bringing in 
of firearms and the wanton destruction of food animals that followed, 
and the Eskimo now depend for their food and clothing in a large 
part upon the provisions which they can buy from the trading ships 
in summer in exchange for furs. 

We spent between two and three weeks on the coast at the Langton 
Bay ship harbor without succeeding in getting any more foxes. 
Finally, December Uth, we started back south and December 13th 
we arrived home. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

WHETHER I was traveling about or staying at home, I 
was always devoting every available hour to the record- 
ing of folk-lore and linguistic material. While Ilavinirk, 
as we have said before, was not much good as a traveling com- 
panion (through a quality which he no doubt looks upon as 
conservatism and good sense, but which we diagnose as timidity), 
he possessed, besides other good qualities, as already mentioned, 
a vast store of the lore and religions of his people and was the 
most patient narrator of them whom I have ever found among 
Eskimo men. But as good an informant as willingness made him, 
he was under the disadvantage, from my point of view, of having, 
during the forty years or so of his lifetime, lived among people 
who spoke so many and various dialects that his own speech had be- 
come a mixture of a dozen or more, and I could never tell when he 
was pronouncing a word in the manner of Kotzebue Sound, when in 
the manner of the upper Noatak, and when after the fashion of the 
people of Point Barrow. He had also in his speech a strong flavoring 
from the Mackenzie district, but this did not trouble me so much, 
for by now my ear had become fairly familiar with the peculiarities 
of that dialect. 

It has been my experience, like that of most other ethnologists, 
that women are better sources of information than men, for several 
reasons. Among primitive people, as among the uneducated of our 
own race, it is much easier to get straightforward answers and intelli- 
gent ones from the women than from the men ; and although Ilavinirk 
was as an informant one of the best Eskimo men I have known, he 
was not nearly so good as his wife Mamayauk, who further had the 
advantage of speaking the Mackenzie dialect fairly pure. True, she 
was in the habit in her daily speech of using certain forms which did 
not belong to her own people, but she had been in the habit of doing 
this only for the last seven or eight years and was still conscious of 
2 a 353 



354 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the fact that these were foreign words, and she could, by watching her- 
self, avoid them in giving information to me. 

There was no danger of the winter becoming tedious to me, for 
in my linguistic and folk-lore investigations I had a field of inquiry 
as full of scientific interest as are researches in any other science, and 
full of human interest besides. There were unsuspected things 
coming up continually. One day I discovered an adjective that in 
Greenland has ceased to be an adjective and has become a suffix, and 
this threw light on the processes by which the language had grown 
to become the complicated and sensitive medium of expression that 
it is. Another day I would find a word of the everyday speech of 
Greenland to be reproduced in some ancient and barely understood 
charm or rigmarole of the Mackenzie district. This likewise threw 
its light on the history of the language. In the folk-lore I would come 
upon stories that were told at the Mackenzie mouth almost exactly 
as Rasmussen had heard them in Smith Sound, and there were 
even elements which might be construed to show European origin, 
or at least common origin with some of the folk-lore of Europe. 

The days were never long enough and the patience of my Eskimo 
never sufficient to make me tire of the day's work before it was over. 
It was different with Dr. Anderson, who had now practically nothing to 
do, for winter is not favorable to zoological investigations, so far as land 
animals are concerned at least. No doubt he as well as I might have 
found the Eskimo folk-lore of interest, but he had never acquired the 
language well enough to be able to follow the narrators in the original 
(and neither did our Eskimo know English well enough to be able to 
express themselves sufficiently clearly or gracefully to give him much 
of an indication of what the character of their thoughts really was), 
for the Eskimo language is a very difficult one to learn. The gram- 
matical structure is fundamentally different from English, and one 
has really to learn a different method of thought before one can 
acquire versatility in expression. 

It is commonly believed that many white men who in one part 
of the world or another have associated with the Eskimo, have 
learned the language of the Eskimo, but this is not the case. I have 
known in Alaska white men who have been married to Eskimo 
women for over thirty years and whose grandchildren are now 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 355 

growing up, and yet they have acquired so little of the Eskimo 
language that when their own wives talk to their own children 
they have no idea what they are saying. The women usually, and 
the children commonly, know scarcely a word of English, and the 
white man knows scarcely a word of Eskimo ; but there has grown up 
in their intercourse a sort of jargon analogous to "pigeon" English, 
or the so-called Chinook which is spoken in certain parts of the 
western United States and Canada. This Eskimo jargon in Alaska 
consists of a few English words, a few from the South Sea Islands 
(and especially the Hawaiian), a word or two from Spanish and from 
Danish, and a number of Eskimo words. The jargon vocabularies of 
different men vary from probably three hundred to five hundred 
words. There being no inflection, this language is easy to learn. It 
can be picked up in a week and will serve for the expression of the 
ordinary simple ideas concerning the everyday life of the North. The 
jargon is, however, quite incapable of expressing any fine shades of 
thought, and those who know it only, get the impression of the 
Eskimo that their minds are more impoverished and their thoughts 
cruder than is really the case. 

Perhaps the chief stumbling-block in the way of the ordinary 
white man in an attempt to learn the language is that his mental 
habits incline him to deal in nouns modified by adjectives. If there 
were no adjectives in Eskimo, the white man would soon discover 
the fact that adjectives cannot be used to modify nouns. There 
are, however, as a matter of fact, a good many adjectives, but they 
are not used in the manner of ours, except on extraordinary occasions. 
When the typical white man begins to learn Eskimo, he will find some 
Eskimo who knows a little English and will cross-question him, writing 
down as a result a vocabulary which he proceeds to learn. Taking 
an object in his hand to make sure that he is not misunderstood, 
the white man will ask: "What is your word for knife?" and the 
Eskimo will reply " Savik " ; " And what is your word for ' big ' ? " will 
be the next question ; and the answer in the Mackenzie River dialect 
will be "angiyok." "Now," thinks the white man, "I know how to 
say 'big knife ' " ; but as a matter of fact he does not know how to say 
"big knife" at all, for the Eskimo does not say "big knife" by attach- 
ing the adjective for "big" to the word for "knife." He has an 



356 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

entirely different word for a big knife from the word he uses for a 
small knife. We, in speaking of a small horse, have the option of 
calling it a small horse or calling it a pony ; practically speaking, in 
everyday life, the Eskimo has no option. If he does not have an en- 
tirely different word for a "small horse" or a "small knife" he will 
nevertheless not use an adjective, but will use a suffix to indicate 
smallness as we can do in a few isolated cases, as in "hill" and "hil- 
lock" and "river" and "rivulet." 

The system of suffixes to modify the meaning of words is far more 
developed with the Eskimo than with us, and is a very useful thing 
in the expression of shades of meaning and in the clear statement of 
new ideas. We can say hill and hilly and hilliness and possibly we 
may say hillocky, but we can never say hillockiness, although it 
seems to me that it would be an excellent thing if we could, for I 
have found by experience that the principle lends itself well to the 
expression of the most finely shaded meanings. The Eskimo can not 
only say "hillockiness," or things analogous to that, but he may go 
on and add six or eight or even more suffixes to a single word, each 
suffix carrying its clear meaning that modifies the fundamental idea 
of the statement. There are over a hundred and sixty suffixes in 
the Mackenzie dialect, and the meanings which they express are far 
more than that number. About the only suffixes which cannot be 
tacked one on to the other are those of contradictory meanings, such 
as those implying longness and shortness or quickness and slowness. 

To illustrate how the principle works when applied to nouns, we 
will take the word iglu, which in those Eskimo dialects where it is 
used at all means a dwelling place of any kind, and in some places 
may apply to the den of an animal or the nest of a bird, although in 
our common dictionaries and works of travel it appears only as the 
word for snow-hut. Attaching appropriate suffixes to the stem of 
iglu, we have iglupvk, a large house; iglunguak, a make-believe 
house or a play house, something which is not really a house but 
you pretend it is ; iglorak, a wooden house ; iglukuk, a ruined house ; 
igluliak, a house that some one built ; iglulianga, the house that he 
built ; igluliakpuk, the house that the two of us built ; iglulik, that 
which contains houses (used for instance for an island which is 
inhabited) ; iglutun, like a house. All of these suffixes and a great 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 357 

many others are used in addition to the declension endings, which 
are analogous to those of Latin or Anglo-Saxon, for instance. These 
run as follows for the singular : 



Nominative 


iglum 




Accusative 


iglu 




Terminalis 


iglumun, 


to the house 


Ablative 


iglumin, 


from the house 


Instrumental 


iglumik, 


by means of the house 


VlALIS 


iglukun, 


through the house 


Locative 


iqlumi, 


in the house 



This is but the beginning. The nouns are used in the singular, 
dual, and plural ; and their use is of course idiomatic, so that you can 
never tell for certain from the English meaning what case you must 
use in the Eskimo. But the noun is simple, compared with the verb. 
"Sum" in Latin was the ordinary form for "I am." The pronoun 
"ego" was used rarely and chiefly for emphasis. Similarly in the 
Eskimo, in the case of transitive verbs, not only is the subject in- 
corporated but the object also, and either the subject or the object 
may be in the singular, dual, or plural number. Besides, there are 
inflections for tenses, and then come the suffixes proper, which have a 
nature peculiar to themselves ; and most confusing of all to the or- 
dinary white man is the fact that these suffixes undergo certain 
euphonistic and other sound changes, so that when you have learned 
to recognize the suffix in one word, you may fail to recognize the 
same suffix in the next. 

No man has ever worked out the number of possible different ways 
in which a single Eskimo verb may be used, but it is undoubtedly 
up in the tens of thousands, if not in the hundreds of thousands. 
At first glance it may seem that you could take an Eskimo verb and 
find out how many suffixes could be used with it, and that you could 
then by the laws of permutation and combination arrive at the num- 
ber of different possible combinations by multiplying 1X2X3X4 
and so on up to 16, or 23, or whatever the number of usable suffixes 
may be; but the case is not so simple as that, for some of the 
suffixes are really identical in meaning and should not therefore be 
used together, and others, while apparently identical in meaning, 



358 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

may nevertheless be used together ; so that it is only by the method 
of trial and error that the result can be arrived at, and then only 
by an Eskimo or by some white man who through a lifetime of study 
has acquired the "feeling" of the language. 

It is common to hear the assertion that the Eskimo is a simple 
language and easy to learn, and you may meet in any town in America 
or Europe some person who says to you, " I had a friend who lived in 
Alaska (or Labrador, or Hudson's Bay) and he learned to speak 
Eskimo in three months." That idea of course is based on the sup- 
position that the jargon which the white men use in dealing wdth the 
Eskimo is in reality the language of the Eskimo ; but it is not, nor 
anything like it. 

In a book such as this it is hopeless to attempt giving an outline 
of the grammatical principles of the language. Any one who is 
sufficiently interested and who happens to know German can get 
them fairly laid down in the grammar of Samuel Kleinschmidt. It 
may, however, be worth while, for purposes of illustration, to give a 
few verb forms that show how suffixes (or infixes, rather) may be 
joined on to a verb to modify its meaning. 

We shall take the verb in the third person, intransitive, 
which in the Mackenzie dialect has the form tikitok (Greenland form : 
tikitpok), he has arrived. Without giving any formal conjugation we 
set down the following at random : 

tikitpit have you arrived ? (singular) 

tikitpetik have you arrived ? (dual) 

tikitpisi have you arrived ? (plural) 

tikitga he arrived at it, he reached it. 

tikinngitga he did not reach it. 

tikiniakpa will he arrive ? 

tikiniakpiung shall you arrive at it ? shall you reach it ? 

tikiniakpaunggiak will he probably reach it ? 

tikiniakpalungniakpaung will he probably reach it ? 
tikiniaksungnakpaunngok he said : would he be likely to reach it, one 

wonders. 

We have stretched this word out now by joining to it suffixes 
(or as they may preferably be called, infixes), until it may 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 359 

seem to the reader in all conscience long enough, but this 
is not half what a skillful Eskimo could do with it. Perhaps the 
example will suffice, however, to incline us to the idea that the con- 
jugation of the Eskimo verb is not a very simple matter. 

What we started out to show here, and it may be hoped that we 
have succeeded, is that the Eskimo is not only an exceedingly compli- 
cated language, but also very different from English. To put it 
roughly, there is no doubt that for an Englishman it would be much 
easier to acquire Russian, Swedish, French, and Greek than to acquire 
Eskimo alone. To take the only actual case the circumstances of 
which are fully known to me, which is of course my own, it may be said 
that I had a book knowledge of the Eskimo before going to the North 
and I have lived for five years in houses where nothing but Eskimo was 
spoken. I listened to every word with all my ears, for to acquire the 
language has been both my chief work and my chief pastime, and yet 
it was only the last of the five winters that my command of the 
language had become such that I could follow without effort the or- 
dinary conversations going on in the house. 

This has turned into an extensive digression on Eskimo linguistics, 
although it was meant in the beginning only as an explanation of 
why it was that I found no difficulty in passing the long winter days, 
while it was a tedious and endless time for Dr. Anderson. He used 
to lecture me on the consolation that a smoker can get from his pipe, 
but I noticed that the atmosphere of the house got fairly thick with 
smoke before he got any noticeable consolation out of it. Finally, 
shortly after Christmas, he made up his mind that he would like to 
make the 150-mile trip to the Baillie Islands, partly to pass away the 
time and also to begin now the transportation to our shipping point 
of some of our more valuable scientific collections. 

Dr. Anderson accordingly set out December 27th for the Baillie 
Islands with two sleds and accompanied by Palaiyak, Tannaumirk, 
and Pannigabluk, the last named of whom had made up her mind to 
sever her connection with our party. They went by way of Langton 
Bay to pick up provisions for the journey, for we had there consider- 
able quantities of flour and other "civilized" foods which we had 
bought from the Teddy Bear. We made it a principle to live on the 
country when we were anywhere else than at Langton Bay, and to 



360 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

live at Langton Bay on the stores we had purchased and which we 
kept there, for indeed there was nothing else to live on at the place 
except the whale which had now been two years dead (thawed two 
summers and frozen two winters) , and was therefore not so palatable 
as it had been the year before. By this I do not mean to say that it 
was unfit for food. We did, as a matter of fact, cut up some of it to 
eat, and that by choice rather than through necessity. The Eskimo 
found it an agreeable change of diet from the fish, venison, and baking 
powder bread, and I found it not particularly distasteful, although I 
preferred the monotony of the venison to the change to rotten whale. 

While Dr. Anderson was gone we at the home camp altered in no 
way our ordinary habits of life. There was not much daylight for 
hunting, so Ilavinirk merely tended his traps and the fish nets. Tend- 
ing fish nets is not, by the way, the most pleasant occupation imagi- 
nable in an Arctic January. The nets were set underneath the ice, 
which had now become about four feet thick, and it took considerable 
work with a pick every day to make a hole so that the net could 
be hauled out, and when it was hauled out the fish had to be 
disentangled from the meshes with the bare hands. Sticking your 
hands into ice water when the weather is something like 40° below 
zero, and especially if the wind is blowing, is as unpleasant a job 
as one can well undertake. We have to use the bare hands also in 
skinning the caribou which we kill in winter, but that is not nearly so 
serious a matter, for whenever your hands get cold you can warm 
them by sticking them inside the body of the animal you are cut- 
ting up. 

The fishing was gradually getting poorer and poorer. The 
outlet of the lake had frozen to the bottom early in the fall, so that 
we knew the fish were still in the lake, but somehow the three kinds 
other than the fresh-water cod seemed to get sleepy and sluggish 
towards midwinter and to cease swimming about. Possibly they 
were, in a way, hibernating in the deepest parts of the lake. The 
"ling" (as I believe the fresh-water cod is called) seemed to get more 
active as winter advanced, so that while in the fall these cod had 
been no more than ten per cent of the catch, by Christmas a 
single net would frequently contain a dozen cod and only three or 
four of the other kinds of fish. Finally towards the middle of January 




Coal Seam, Coal Creek. 




Smoking Mountains (Burning Coal Mines), Franklin Bay. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 361 

the ice had become so thick and the fish so few that I agreed with 
Ilavinirk in thinking it was scarcely worth while to continue. 

Of course it is only after having tried it that one can learn how best 
to do such a thing as to winter under the conditions which we had 
to face. During the few days while we were building our house 
in the fall we noticed that Back's greyling were running down the 
creek past us in continuous streams day and night. Had we not 
been in such a hurry to build the house and had we put up a fish 
trap instead, we could have taken tens of thousands of fish at our 
very door ; but when the house had been built and we turned our 
attention to the fishing, the run was already over. Had we to winter 
again in Coal Creek we could, on the basis of this knowledge, rely on 
putting up tons of fish in the few weeks immediately preceding the 
freeze up. It took us some time also to find the best fishing places in 
the lake. With plenty of nets, ranging from a 2^-inch to a 5-inch 
mesh, a large quantity of food could be gotten together while the ice is 
thin the first few weeks after it forms, by setting the nets in the right 
places. 

Although Ilavinirk had found out in the fall that there were no 
white foxes around Langton Bay, he was by the middle of January 
thoroughly convinced that now there must be lots of them every- 
where on the seacoast and especially on the promontories, such as 
Cape Bathurst. I was bound to put my entire time on the linguistic 
work and he was bound that nothing at Coal Creek should succeed 
in keeping us there any longer than until Dr. Anderson returned, so 
although he hunted every day, I was as sure as I know he was 
that he would find no game. "1 knew in my heart" that had I 
cared to make a good day's hunt to the eastward I should have been 
able to find something, but after all, my only concern this winter was 
to keep my Eskimo in good humor and to follow them around, writing 
folk-lore from their dictation whenever they were in the house. 
Accordingly, when Dr. Anderson returned, January 30th, we began 
making preparations to move to the coast. 

He brought back from the Baillie Islands such news as was in a 
measure to be expected. Captain Wolki and his ship's company 
were wintering there, and so was Captain Bernard of the Teddy Bear. 
There had been sickness as always and people were dying now and 



362 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

then. One of those who had died was Natkusiak's wife. He had 
also become a bit tired of his association with the Bailhe Islanders, 
and consequently had decided to return to us with Dr. Anderson. 
Tannaumirk, on the other hand, had been picked up as a desirable 
son-in-law by one of the Baillie Islands families and had therefore 
left our service. 

Although Natkusiak reported that all winter the people of the 
Baillie Islands had caught no foxes, still he agreed with Ilavinirk 
in thinking that surely there must be plenty of them out at Cape 
Parry. Temperamentally it seems difficult for Eskimo to imagine 
that things can change. Natkusiak had found plenty of foxes on 
Cape Parry in January, 1910, and he could not see why there should 
not be plenty also in January, 1912. But I felt certain that the 
same condition, namely the distance from land of the open water, that 
kept the foxes away from Cape Bathurst must also be keeping them 
away from Cape Parry. 

As my chief object was to keep the Eskimo in good humor, and 
as even Dr. Anderson seemed a bit anxious to move (for when he 
stayed in camp there was nothing for him to do), we started on Feb- 
ruary 15th, hauling our belongings towards Langton Bay. For the 
first fifteen or eighteen miles of this journey we had to follow the river, 
but when the time came for leaving it and striking across over the 
mountains to Langton Bay, we camped for a few days at the last 
trees, so that while some of us advanced part of our gear halfway 
from the river to Langton Bay and cached it there, Dr. Anderson, 
with Natkusiak for company, was able to make a short trip down 
Horton River in search of bush rabbits, the skins of which he wanted 
for scientific specimens. In ordinary years rabbits abound among the 
large willows north of the spruce tree line towards the mouth of 
Horton River. 

When Dr. Anderson returned, all of us struck across country for 
the sea ; and on February 20th we reached Langton Bay to find there 
encamped in our storehouse the Baillie Islands Eskimo Alingnak 
with his wife Guninana and their adopted daughter. At first it 
seemed a nuisance to find them there, for I had heard much of the 
contagious sickness from which Alingnak suffered, and of the laziness 
which white men and Eskimo alike seem to have found his chief 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 363 

characteristic. We found him, however, to be a cheerful and good 
companion and not at all lazy, although incapable of hard work 
through ill health. But his wife Guninana proved to be so valuable a 
find for my linguistic work that no matter what the rest of the family 
might have been, I should have been glad to keep them. Up to 
this time my chief informant had been Mamayauk, but I found that 
Guninana was far better versed in the ancient lore of her people, 
spoke the Baillie Islands dialect with undoubted purity of accent, 
and was the most cheerful and long-suffering person I have ever 
encountered in answering what must necessarily be tedious questions 
because of the great sameness about them and their (to the Eskimo 
mind) complete lack of point ; for naturally the Eskimo can see little 
importance in the laws of sound change between dialects, or in the 
modifications of sounds through association with other sounds within 
a word. 

My experience of two years before had shown that at this season 
of the year there was a probability of finding caribou in the low hills 
between Langton Bay and Darnley Bay. It suited everybody that 
Dr. Anderson and most of the able-bodied men should go down 
there (which they did on February 25th) looking for the caribou and 
with the hope of trapping foxes, while the rest of us remained 
at Langton Bay, I writing folk-lore at Guninana's dictation while 
the others kept house. 

Guninana was not only well informed, but was also, fortunately for 
me, not such a good Christian as the rest of her countrymen. She 
had not yet learned that the native lore of her people was essentially 
wicked and needed to be forgotten, and she told me of how diseases 
were controlled, how famines were averted, how people were killed 
or cured by magic, how the future could be foretold and the 
secrets of the past uncovered, how people could see through hills 
and fly to the moon, and various things of that sort of which the 
Christian Eskimo pretend an ignorance and of which they will either 
tell you nothing or else half truths and untruths. Personally I 
have always been unable to see why the creations of the Eskimo's 
imagination should be any more wicked than our "blue-beards," or 
why the knowledge of the Eskimo method of reading the future should 
be any more likely to lead to damnation than our palmistry or the 



364 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

reading of the grounds in the bottom of a teacup ; but so it seems 
to be. And if there are only some of the missionaries who think the 
native lore wicked, that minority have impressed their views so com- 
pletely on the Eskimo that no Eskimo who values his immortal 
soul (and most of them value their immortal souls extravagantly) 
will defile himself or endanger his eternal welfare by telling the 
things which they still believe quite as much as they ever did, but 
which they now consider to be wicked, and which they have abjured 
on the principle of its not profiting a man to gain the whole earth if 
he lose his own soul. Most of the Eskimo are a bit regretful over 
having surrendered the familiar spirits which formerly served them 
and did their every bidding : changed for them the winds, cured their 
children when they were ill, and brought caribou to be killed at the 
very front doors of the houses. Many of them express freely their 
regret that the use of such useful magic should be incompatible 
with salvation. 

While Dr. Anderson and his party were hunting caribou east of 
the bay, one or another of them paid us a visit every two or three 
days, and the whole party finally returned March 10th. They had 
killed eleven deer and seen a good many others and had trapped 
two or three foxes. The idea of going to Cape Parry had been quite 
given up because shortly before we came to the coast Alingnak had 
been out there and had seen no tracks of either polar bear or fox. 

At the place where they had been hunting caribou, which was, by 
the way, the lake of which Natkusiak and I had made such a hazard- 
ous crossing the previous June, there is an excellent fishing place, 
well known to the Baillie Islands Eskimo, where Alingnak in the fall 
had put up several hundred pounds of fish ; and although the killing 
of eleven caribou in two weeks was in itself nothing much, still the 
meat amounted to a good deal when they brought it home because 
they had lived in part on the fish cache and had not been compelled 
to feed the caribou meat up so fast to the dogs, as they otherwise 
would have had to do. 

On March 12th visitors from the Baillie Islands arrived. They 
were the Mackenzie River couple Kommana and Ituayok, with 
their little daughter Siksigak, and Alingnak's father, lyituaryuk. 
They had come in seven days from the winter settlement of Nogarvik, 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 365 

which is about twelve miles east of the Baillie Islands. On the way 
they had secured only two seals and had consequently been on short 
rations. They told further stories of illness and death at the Baillie 
Islands, and a woman well known to us, named Inonngranna, had 
gone permanently insane. We learned later that Captain Wolki 
and the other white men at the Baillie Islands were inclined to 
blame the insanity to a violent religious revival in which the woman 
had been one of the chief participants. There may be something 
in that theory, for the fear of hell is among the newly Christianized 
Eskimo an obsession such as we can scarcely comprehend; but I 
think it more likely that the insanity may have had some deeper or- 
ganic cause, although the woman had apparently been in the best of 
health up to the time of the outbreak. 

Kommana, in order to buy my favor, brought me a present which 
he knew I would appreciate : a knife of ancient pattern and with a 
well -attested history. There had been a man in the Point Atkinson 
community some forty years ago who became intolerable to his 
fellows, and three of the most energetic and public-spirited men 
volunteered to execute him. This matter had the complete ap- 
proval of the community, and was the knowledge of every one 
except the victim. One day the three men took him aside and 
of a sudden the most resolute, the owner of the knife, stabbed 
the man in the back with this very knife. The Eskimo system of 
government, which is really no system at all (or in other words a 
communistic anarchy), has but this one punishment, except that the 
power of public opinion is so much stronger with them than with us 
that the mere knowledge of having displeased the community would 
be severe punishment in itself. It seems then, on the face of it, that 
removing an intolerable man in the manner just described is not a 
bad way of dealing with a difficult situation ; and it would not be if 
the story ended there. But the weak point of the system is that no 
matter if the man's relations may have been loudest of all in denounc- 
ing him and demanding that he should be killed, still the moment 
that any one kills him it becomes the duty of his relatives to take blood 
revenge on some member of the family of those who helped do the 
killing. Some one has to be killed, though it need not be the man 
directly responsible — it may quite as well be his decrepit mother 



366 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

or his little niece ; and even that does not square things, for as soon as 
the relation has been killed in revenge for the execution, it becomes 
the duty of the executioner and his family to take revenge again 
upon the family of the man originally executed, so that there com- 
mences a blood feud which has no ending until the tribe divides in 
two sections, one of which moves to a distant place quite out of the 
reach of the other. This is the general way things run, but it seems 
that in the particular case with which our story of the knife is con- 
cerned, the relations of the executed man made it known that they 
intended to kill all the executioners, and within four or five years 
they had succeeded in killing two of them. But the third man, 
the owner of the knife, had been so watchful and had carried this 
long knife around with him so constantly that he had not yet been 
killed when a severe epidemic of measles swept off most of the fam- 
ily of the avengers, with the result that the owTier of the knife 
lived for many years and finally died a natural death. 

After telling the story of the knife, Kommana handed it to me. 
I immediately asked him what he wanted in payment for it, but before 
he had named his price some one remarked that the owner of the knife 
was the father of Guninana, the woman who for the last three weeks 
had been a member of our party. I asked Kommana then how he 
came by the knife, and he said that just last fall, on the way from the 
Mackenzie River to the Baillie Islands, he happened to pass the 
grave on which the knife was lying and he thought to himself he 
would pick it up and give it to me. It seemed to me that Guninana 
might have a word to say about the matter ; and it throws an interest- 
ing light on their habits of thought that she replied that the knife had 
belonged to her father and not to her, and that if Kommana dared 
to take the risk of removing it from the grave it was no concern of 
hers, and if any one got a price for it it should be Kommana, for he 
had brought it, and he and his family were running all the risks (of 
supernatural punishment). Kommana's comment on this was that 
surely he was the man to be paid ; and as for being afraid of taking 
the knife from the grave, that was a matter which did not worry 
him very much, because wherever he went he carried a prayer book 
and hymnal with him and never neglected saying his prayers at night 
and grace before meals, and he felt sure therefore that nothing 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 367 

evil could harm him. Guninana did not seem to feel the least re- 
sentment in the matter, but apparently was not quite so certain as 
Kommana that no supernatural punishment would follow the offense ; 
it was a matter entirely between Kommana and the supernatural 
powers and she had no concern in it, nor wished to have. 

After the arrival of this last party I devoted my inquiries for some 
days, not to the folk-lore and linguistic side, but to the actual history 
of the people at the time, some fifty years ago, when lyituaryuk was 
a boy, with special reference to what they knew about the relations 
between the Baillie Islands Eskimo and the Fort Good Hope (Hare) 
Indians. The details are too complicated for setting down here, but 
the net result was to show that the relation had been semi-friendly 
with occasional trade intercourse ; that there had been killings now 
and then (in the way of murders) ; that on both sides captives 
had now and then been carried off and had been allowed to live 
by their captors ; and that in one case an Eskimo child had been sold 
for a definite price to Indians, among whom she is said to be still 
living. 

My informants went into much detail willingly about the 
various customs of man-killing. They agreed that in general to 
kill a man was about the equivalent of killing a whale, though they 
were a little doubtful whether the killing of an Eskimo was to be 
considered quite so much of an achievement as the killing of whale ; 
but an Indian was quite up to a whale. In either case the one who 
did the killing was entitled to two tattoo lines across his face. If a 
whale was killed, the man had a line tattooed from the corners of the 
mouth to the lobes of the ears ; but if an Indian had been killed the 
tattoo lines were from the nose to the ears. On the other hand, 
lyituaryuk had seen Indians tattooed around the roots of the hair and 
had been told that those were Indians who had killed Eskimo. In 
the case of the killing of either a whale or an Indian the Eskimo 
who did it had to refrain from all work for five days and from certain 
foods for a year. Notably he must not eat the intestines of any 
animals nor their heads. 



CHAPTER XXV 

WE had already at Langton Bay done archseologlcal work 
upon which we had been able to base certain important con- 
clusions with reference to the Eskimo of that district. The 
transportation problem, the matter of hauling our finds from Langton 
Bay to the Baillie Islands, was so serious that it had long seemed 
unlikely we could accomplish much more the coming spring than 
the mere hauling to the Baillie Islands of the materials which we 
had already. Dr. Anderson's specimens of caribou skins, grizzly 
bears, and polar bears were especially numerous, heavy, and bulky. 
As for the linguistic and folk-lore investigations, they could of 
course go on without end. Guninana alone could have told me 
stories, she said (and I suppose it to be true), that it would have 
taken me years to write down. 

It had always seemed to me that important results were to be 
looked for from archseological work done at Point Barrow, the most 
northerly point of the western half of the continent of America, 
and anything we could find at Point Barrow would be easy of trans- 
portation to civilization, for whaling ships, freighters, and United 
States revenue cutters call there each year. Dr. Anderson and I 
therefore talked the matter over, and for the reason already mentioned 
(and others which need not be entered into) I decided to make the 
thousand-mile trip to Point Barrow by sled. On the way I intended 
to visit for ethnological purposes every Eskimo settlement along the 
coast. I could do that, travel slowly, and yet get to Point Barrow in 
plenty of time to put in the season at archaeological work before tak- 
ing the ship for home. Dr. Anderson and our Eskimo could take care 
of the transportation work from Langton Bay to the Baillie Islands, 
and if they had any spare time they could do a little digging in the 
house ruins at the mouth of the Horton River or elsewhere, while 
Anderson would of course concern himself with zoological collecting. 

368 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 369 

After this plan had been decided upon it took us but a few days 
to get ready, and on March 20th we started towards the Baillie Islands 
with three sledges loaded with scientific specimens. On March 
22d we arrived there, or rather at the Eskimo settlement at the tip 
of Cape Bathurst, where the Rosie H. and the Teddy Bear were also 
wintering. 

After a week spent pleasantly in visiting Captain Bernard and 
Captain Wolki, Natkusiak and I started April 1st for the west on 
one of our longest journeys together, leaving Dr. Anderson and the 
rest of the party to return to Langton Bay. The boy Palaiyak 
accompanied us with the intention of going as far as Herschel Island 
to visit his relatives and to return to Langton Bay in the summer 
aboard the Belvedere. 

The journey towards Point Barrow, although a long one, is 
very simple, for it is never much over two hundred miles between 
houses and there are four points at least where one can count on se- 
curing provisions — from Captain Anderson of the North Star trad- 
ing schooner at Point Atkinson, from Mr. Young and Mr. Fry at 
the Church of England mission on the eastern edge of the Mackenzie 
delta, from Captain Cottle of the Belvedere and the mounted police 
at Herschel Island, and from Mr. Leffingwell, where he was carrying 
forward his geological studies on the north coast of Alaska at Flax- 
man Island. And then at Point Barrow we were sure of a welcome 
from old friends and of walking into an abundance of almost every- 
thing that a man could wish for to minister to his comfort in the 
Arctic. 

After crossing Liverpool Bay in two days we came to the house of 
Mr. John Anderson, near Cape Dalhousie, where he had been trapping 
alone all winter, visited once a month or so by his brother. Captain 
Matt Anderson, whose winter quarters were at Point Atkinson, 
about fifty-seven miles to the west. When I told Mr. Anderson of 
the things we had been doing the past two or three years, it seemed to 
him that we had gone through many hardships and had done difiicult 
things ; but it seemed to me that living alone as he was doing and 
monotonously visiting the same circle of traps day after day, with 
nothing to look forward to but the monthly visits of his brother, was 
a thing I was less eager to try than to repeat our own experiences. 
2b 



370 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

He had not even any dogs for company or to help him with his 
work, and the day we spent with him we helped him haul to the 
house a load or two of firewood from the beach about half a mile 
away. This is so near the mouth of the Mackenzie that in favorable 
locations there are hundreds of cords of driftwood to the mile of beach. 

Although we learned that Captain Anderson with his wonderful 
team of dogs (trained after the manner of the Alaskan sweepstakes 
racers that go the four hundred miles from Nome to Candle in three 
days) was in the habit of coming from Point Atkinson to his brother's 
trapping camp in seven hours, it took us nearly three days to make 
the same distance, for this is a gameless coast and our sled was heavy 
with seal and whale meat for dog food. We could no doubt have made 
the distance in two days, but certain deserted Eskimo houses in 
which it was convenient to camp induced us to divide the journey 
in three sections. 

At Point Atkinson April 5th we found not only Captain Matthew 
Anderson and the village of Eskimo who had gathered there around 
the wintering place of the North Star, but also Rev. Mr. Fry, a Church 
of England missionary to the Eskimo of the Mackenzie district, 
who was on his way to the Baillie Islands. Mr. Fry, although young 
in the service, brought a good deal of enthusiasm to the work and had 
linguistic ability evidently beyond the ordinary, for he had already 
in two years picked up a smattering of the Eskimo which was con- 
siderably in excess of that commonly acquired by whalemen in an 
entire lifetime. 

I was especially interested in meeting Mr. Fry, because I wanted 
to learn from him his attitude with reference to certain matters which 
I had often discussed with various Eskimo, most often with our own 
employees, notably the form which certain Christian doctrines have 
taken in their minds, as described by me in Chapter XXVII of this 
book headed "On the Conversion of the Heathen." I found, as I 
had expected, that although Mr. Fry's ideas of Christianity were 
more those which one might have expected forty years ago than 
those in vogue in our enlightened churches of to-day, still he is in 
no way intentionally responsible for most of the curious ideas which 
the Eskimo hold of his teachings and those of his senior, Mr. 
Whittaker. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 371 

In the village near Captain Anderson's ship was, among others, a 
young boy who had been for several months in Mr. Fry's house for 
the purpose of learning English as well as mastering the elements of 
Christianity. Mr. Fry and I had various talks while he was with us 
about whether the Eskimo still retained the doctrines of their old sys- 
tem, my point of view being that they believed now everything which 
they had ever believed, and all the doctrines and facts of Christianity 
on top of that. Mr. Fry felt certain that this young man at least had 
quite relinquished all the old beliefs. 

The day before I left Captain Anderson's place Mr. Fry left for 
the Baillie Islands. It was unfortunately not until after he had gone 
that Captain Anderson and I got into a talk with the young man who 
had so long lived with Mr. Fry in his house and who was therefore 
considered by the rest of the Eskimo to bean authority on the doctrines 
of the Church. I asked him whether he believed his countrymen were 
able to fly to the moon, or from one village to another, magically. 
He said, and there were half a dozen other people in the house at 
the time who agreed with him, that the fact of many people being 
able to fly to the moon was a matter of common knowledge, just as 
their ability to walk on snow-shoes or to snare ptarmigan was a matter 
of common knowledge. We asked the boy to specify some of the 
people who could do this, and he named among others Alualuk, at 
whose house I would sleep on my way west the first day after leaving 
Captain Anderson's place. He also specified a young man whom I 
knew well, named Kublualuk, who had long been in the employ of 
the mounted police at Herschel Island. Alualuk, he said, had un- 
fortunately embraced Christianity and had since then ceased to fly, 
but Kublualuk, he thought, had not yet been converted and would 
still have his old powers. There were others who could do it too, 
some of them right in the village beside us ; but he thought that per- 
haps none of them would fly even if I asked them to, because they now 
understood that to employ familiar spirits is wicked and that a man 
cannot employ them without endangering his prospects of salvation. 

After he had given us all the information he had with regard to 
flying, the boy asked me what I would give any one who would perform 
the magic flight for me, and I suggested my rifle and field glasses, 
both of which were of a kind and quality much coveted by the Eskimo. 



372 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

The young man thought he would very hkely be able to find some 
one who would fly for me in order to get these articles, although he 
said that the risk of offending God was considerable and the pay small 
in proportion to the risk. Upon hearing this, Captain Anderson vol- 
unteered to give any of them the schooner North Star with her entire 
cargo, suggesting at the same time that the risk of damnation was 
not very great, especially if some young man did the flying, for he 
would no doubt have ample time in which to repent of his wickedness 
before he died. Of course nothing came of the conversation, for the 
boy canvassed the village without finding any one who would weigh 
the prospect of gaining a schooner against the prospect of losing 
his soul. Captain Anderson said, however, he would be sure when 
Mr. Fry returned to inform him in exactly how far his favorite 
disciple and housemate had renounced the beliefs of his Eskimo 
forefathers. 

I stayed at Captain Anderson's several days merely because there 
was no hurry, for all I had to do was to reach Point Barrow 
within two months. There was always interesting information to 
pick up from talking with the old people of the village, and inciden- 
tally I was able to be of some slight use to Mr. Fry in explaining cer- 
tain things to the Eskimo and in assisting at a ceremony of vaccina- 
tion. There was a rumor that smallpox was prevalent among the 
Indians in the interior of Alaska, and it goes without saying that an 
attack of this disease upon the Eskimo of the Mackenzie district 
would probably carry off most of the few whom the measles have 
allowed to survive until now. 

On the morning of April 11th early we started on our westward 
march again. By fast travel we reached the eastern edge of the Mac- 
kenzie delta proper at eight in the evening and lodged at the house of 
an old friend of mine, Alualuk (mentioned before), whom I had 
known on my first expedition in 1906. Alualuk had then been a 
shaman in possession of half a dozen familiar spirits which enabled 
him to cure diseases, wake people from the dead, and perform various 
miracles with the greatest ease. He told me now that since I saw him 
last he had become a Christian, had renounced all his familiar spirits, 
and was now as powerless as I or any other man in dealing 
with the things of the other world. He told me that not only had 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 373 

he found it an inconvenience to be without the assistance of the 
spirits which had served him so long and efficiently, but he also 
missed them as one misses a friend who is dead or who has gone 
away, for his association with them had been so intimate. Also, 
he said, the spirits grieved at having been separated from him and 
he pitied them in their loneliness. Some of them had been moved 
to anger rather than to grief at being cast out; one or two of 
them, in fact, would lose no opportunity of doing him harm if 
they could, so that he had to be very watchful in saying his prayers 
and keeping the commandments of the Christian Church in order 
to assure himself of the protection of Jesus from the wiles and 
meditated attacks of these his former servants. He reminded me 
that, as I no doubt knew, he had waked Taiakpanna from the dead 
when he had died a few years ago. That was while the spirits 
served him. Now Taiakpanna had died again and this time he 
(Alualuk) had been powerless to wake him from the dead. He could 
now only weep for the loss of his friend and pray that his soul might 
have found salvation. 

We were entertained for a day most hospitably by Alualuk's 
family. They were living comfortably for the present, with an abun- 
dance of fish to eat, but they complained much of prospective poverty, 
for they had been able to get very few foxes and would have little 
with which to buy tea and tobacco the following summer. 

Living as a neighbor of Alualuk's in a tent a mile or two away was 
an old acquaintance of mine, a Swiss-American named John Gruben, 
who had been on the north coast of Alaska for a good many years 
and whom I first knew at Flaxman Island in 1907. He was now 
traveling about among the Mackenzie Eskimo representing Captain 
Cottle and trying to do some trading for him, a thing that was impos- 
sible in the nature of the case, for the people had nothing with which 
to pay for anything they might want to buy. 

April 13th we left Alualuk's, and in a day's journey of something 
over forty miles we reached the Church of England Mission at Kitte- 
garyuit, on the mainland opposite Richard Island. Here we were 
received with the greatest hospitality by Mr. Young, an old worker 
in the mission field. We stayed with him several days, partly be- 
cause we enjoyed it and there was no reason for hurrying, and partly 



374 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

also to give me time to write out a list of Eskimo inflections and 
suflSxes for the use of Mr. Fry in his work of acquiring the language. 

After spending five pleasant days with Mr. Young in his com- 
fortable house we resumed our journeying again, and went on about 
eighteen miles to another camp of Eskimo whom I had known when I 
wintered in this district in 1906, and the day after that we reached a 
village of four or five houses at Tununirk, the south point of Richard 
Island. It was on Friday that we came there. This was the home of 
my old friend Ovayuak, who had entertained me so generously at his 
house for several months six years before on my first visit to the coun- 
try. I had therefore to stay for several days to talk over old times. 
There was so much rejoicing in camp over our visit that although 
the main occupation of the community was rabbit hunting and al- 
though there was nothing to eat except the rabbits shot by the men 
and the ptarmigan snared and the fish hooked by the women, still 
all these occupations were suspended in honor of our coming, and 
we feasted so energetically that by Saturday night we had eaten up 
all the food that was in camp. This did not seem serious to me in 
the evening, for there were ptarmigan on every hillside and rabbits 
in every bush, and doubtless a good many fat fish under the ice 
right in front of our tent door. But on Sunday morning, as I might 
have known would be the case had I thought of the matter, nobody 
was willing to do anything toward getting food, for it was now the 
Sabbath and the Sabbath must not be broken. I felt a bit hungry 
myself. There were on our sled little provisions beyond a few deli- 
cacies which Mr. Young had given us to help along on the journey 
to Herschel Island, and I was stingy of these, so instead of bringing 
them out at once I informed the community that I also was well 
versed in the Scripture and proceeded to tell them the story of how 
the ears of corn had been gathered on the Sabbath. The consensus 
of comment was that while to take flour off the bush in the country 
where it grows might not be wrong, they had had specific instructions 
that it was wrong to hunt rabbits or to fish on Sunday, and they 
would therefore prefer to go hungry rather than risk the displeasure 
of the Deity. 

I thought it would be too much of a task for me alone to go out 
with the idea of getting rabbits for the whole crowd, so I took 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 375 

out of my sled and shared with them what was not nearly enough 
food to satisfy our hunger, but it was all we had to do us over Sun- 
day. Monday morning bright and early every one was out hunt- 
ing and fishing, and long before noon we had plenty to eat. This 
entire community had been heathen to a man when I lived with 
them in 1906. 

It is said sometimes about the people of New England that they 
consider cleanliness next to godliness. It is true of the Mackenzie 
River Esldmo to-day that they look upon washing as a part of godli- 
ness. Soaps, towels, and the wash-basins are with them concrete 
means of grace. Although Christianity had not yet obtained hold 
among these people as a confession of faith when I first lived with 
them (in 1906), the idea was even then prevalent that washing was 
a thing of magic value, likely to promote good fortune and turn away 
evil influences. I tried then and later to counteract this idea as 
much as possible by seldom washing, but this deterred them in no 
way, for they knew from my frank avowals that I was not a shaman 
and knew nothing of the occult forces. 

I found now on Saturday night in Ovayuak's house that things had 
gone much farther in the matter of washing and towels than they 
had when I lived with them five years before. Just before bedtime 
Ovayuak got out a tub filled a quarter full of water and took a bath. 
Although he had been an apparently healthy man when I first knew 
him, both he and other members of his family now have sores on vari- 
ous parts of their bodies which I have no doubt are of syphilitic 
origin. After bathing he wiped with a towel, rubbing it into all 
these sores. When he was through bathing, his wife took the towel, 
and after bathing wiped with it also. It was then passed on to the 
other members of the family, and when everybody had bathed the 
towel was hung up beside the stove to dry. Next morning when 
we woke up all the family washed their faces and wiped with the one 
towel. Several visitors also came in to have breakfast in our house, 
and, as the custom is among these people now, they all washed their 
hands and faces in their host's wash-basin and wiped with his towel. 
I expostulated with Ovayauk, explaining to him by analogies with 
certain vermin with which they were thoroughly familiar that the 
germs which inhabit the sores that accompany contagious diseases 



376 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

get on the towel when it is rubbed into the sores, and will later on 
be transferred by the towel to the eyes and other parts of the bodies of 
people who wipe with it. Notably would these invisible vermin enter 
any sores which the person who used the towel might happen to have 
on his body and would make them sick in turn. By much explaining 
I was able to make these things thoroughly clear to my Eskimo 
friends, and it was evident not only that they believed me but also 
that they were much impressed with the danger they were in. 

When I saw how clear an impression I had made I said : " Now 
you must not do these things any more. You must promise me that 
you won't take any more baths unless you each wipe with your own 
towel, which you allow no one else to use or unless the towel can 
be boiled between times." But they answered regretfully that they 
could not follow my advice because they had so few towels. God 
had commanded them that they must wash all over their bodies 
every Saturday night and must wash their hands and faces 
before every meal and on waking up in the morning. Their first 
duty was, they considered, to obey God lest they fail to attain salva- 
tion, for they considered that the health of the body was of small 
consequence beside the welfare of the soul. 

The point is, of course, as we have explained elsewhere, that they 
look upon the missionary as the spokesman of God, and anything 
which he tells them they consider he tells them as the direct command- 
ment of the Lord. For that reason, although they were much exer- 
cised over the gruesome picture which I had painted of the effects 
of the promiscuous use of towels, they felt themselves unable to do 
anything because the commandments of God in the matter had to 
be obeyed at all costs. They explained to me, as others have done on 
similar occasions, that when I first knew them and lived among them 
they had not been Christians, but that they had since learned about 
heaven and hell and considered that nothing else is of vital importance 
except the avoiding of eternal punishment ; for after all, they said, a 
man has to die sometime anyway and it makes comparatively little 
difference when he dies, but if he observes the commandments of God 
while he lives, his soul will when he dies go to heaven and dwell there 
in joy forever. 

The best I could do was to make these people promise me that the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 377 

next time the missionary came their way they would ask him ; and 
that if it was true, as I said, that they had misunderstood him 
and that he had had no intention of telhng them that washing was 
necessary to salvation ; if he were to confirm my statements in this 
matter and they were to learn that washing was really merely a 
matter of cleanliness and had nothing to do with the soul's welfare, 
then they would quickly stop washing unless they could get towels. 
They said that, as far as that went, they did not see why they might 
not stop washing altogether, because their ancestors before them had 
been healthy and well without washing, and it was only because of 
the desire to keep all the commandments of the Lord that they were 
washing now. 

I pointed out to them my own example and showed how I much 
preferred to go unwashed rather than use towels which others used. 
I told them that I was not the least bit afraid of eternal punishment 
in consequence, and asked them whether they did not think I would 
know about it if eternal punishment were the punishment of the 
unwashed. But they explained to me that they considered my in- 
formation might be deficient, for the missionary had told them that 
in matters of religion, in many cases, the foolish knew the things which 
were hidden from the wise. 

April 22d we said good-by to these old friends of ours and started 
west across the delta. We were now in a thickly settled district 
and met people or passed their camps every day. April 24th we got 
to Escape Reef, where there were some Eskimo houses and where 
there was also living Mr. Storkerson, who had been a member of our 
party for a short while the fall of 1908. That night there arrived 
also at Escape Reef Mr. Charles H. Burt, a miner, of San Francisco, 
California, accompanied by a Loucheux Indian, Enoch Moses, and 
by Mr. Louis Cardinal. Mr. Burt with three white companions 
had been engaged in some mining operations on the westernmost 
channel of the Mackenzie delta and was now on his way to Herschel 
Island to visit Captain Cottle. The evening of the following day I 
started for Herschel Island in company with Mr. Burt and the 
others, and we got there early in the morning of April 26th. 

During my stay of about a week at Herschel Island I was the guest 
of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police at the barracks. The de- 



378 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

tachment was in command of Inspector Beyts and consisted of three 
men besides him. But while I was formally stajdng at the barracks 
I spent much of my time aboard the Karluk with my friends Captain 
and Mrs. Cottle. Several of their visitors and some members of their 
crew I knew also from former years, and I had now a pleasant oppor- 
tunity of renewing old acquaintances. 

We stayed at the island a week as it was, but we might have stayed 
longer had it not been that every one there was firmly impressed with 
the idea that this was going to be an exceptionally early spring and 
that the rivers might be expected to come out on the ice at any time. 
Of course we did not desire to be caught by the spring thaws four 
hundred miles short of our destination (Point Barrow) and so on 
May 4th, late in the evening, we pulled out, but travelled only about 
twelve miles, half around the island, and camped, on the " Sou'west 
Sandspit," as it is known to the whalers. Natkusiak and I were 
now alone, for we had left Palaiyak, as intended, with his relatives 
at the island. 

Herschel Island is apparently of alluvial formation and is about 
five hundred feet above sea-level at its highest, is irregular in shape, 
with its longest diameter about eight miles, and has three sandspits 
running out of it. The shortest, and under present conditions the most 
important, is one of not over half a mile near the northeast corner of 
the island, which by an elbow curve forms between itself and the main 
body of the island one of the finest harbors in all the Arctic waters, 
and one that has been used by the whaling fleet ever since the first 
ship of them wintered in this part of the Arctic in 1889. This 
sandspit was, before the white men came, the site of an Eskimo 
village, and so was the sandspit at the southeast corner of the island, 
known now to the white men as Flanders Point, The longest sandspit 
of the three is at the southwest corner of the island, for which 
reason it is known as "Sou'west Sandspit." It is about five miles 
long, thickly covered with driftwood, and carries, as well as the others, 
the ruins of former Eskimo dwellings. 

There is nothing much to tell of our journey west from 
Herschel Island until we reached Collinson Point. We passed here 
and there on the way ancient ruins which we had often seen before 
(for I had made this same journey tvace by sled and twice by boat 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 379 

in previous years), and now and again also more recent habitations, 
constructed within the last year or two but now abandoned. 

At Collinson Point we found the trader E. B. O'Connor, known in 
Nome and elsewhere in Alaska as ''Duffy" O'Connor, He and his 
stores of trade goods had been brought in from Nome the previous 
summer and landed here, while the ship returned to Bering Straits. 
As any one could have told him who knew the conditions, this was 
not the place for trading, for it is not a country rich in foxes. The 
Eskimo of the neighborhood are few and indolent, and besides that, 
Mr. LefEngwell's trading establishment at Flaxman Island was only 
sixty miles to the west. It never seemed possible to me that even 
Mr. Leffingwell alone could make expenses by trading in that country, 
and certainly there was nothing to divide between him and O'Connor. 
These things Mr. O'Connor had found out long before we arrived 
there, but to have found them out even the day after his ship left 
would have been already too late, for when a man is once set down 
so far from civilization with an outfit of trade goods he can do 
nothing but stay and see it through. Mr. O'Connor was staying 
and seeing it through. He was as hospitable as every one else is 
in that country, and really more so. He treated us with the 
greatest possible kindness and urged us to stay as long as we dared. 
When we left I think he was sorely tempted to hitch up his dogs and 
accompany us, for he was clearly homesick for his family and friends 
at Nome. 

From Collinson Point it was but a day's journey to Flaxman 
Island. This was a place where I had lived for several months in 
1906, at the time of its occupation by the Anglo-American Polar 
Expedition commanded by Leffingwell and Mikkelsen, and I had 
revisited it many times since. There was still at Flaxman Island 
Mr. Ernest de Koven Leffingwell, who had returned there in 1909 
with an ample supply of the comforts and the conveniences of civihza- 
tion for the purpose incidentally of trading, but primarily of carrying 
on geological researches in the neighborhood to complete investiga- 
tions which he had begun in 1906-1907. 

Mr. LeflSngwell was doing work on an intensive scale, it may be 
said, for he had confined most of his activities to the district between 
the Colville River eighty miles west of Flaxman Island, and Barter 



380 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Island fifty or sixty miles to the east of it, and to the Endicott Moun- 
tains to the south. To put in three years on an area more than a 
hundred and twenty-five miles long by forty or so wide may not 
seem very "intensive" to those used to geological work in lower 
latitudes, but it means closer investigation probably than has been 
carried out by any one else in so high a latitude on the North 
American continent. An especially valuable part of his work, from 
the point of view of the whaling and trading vessels which enter 
this region, is his careful charting by double triangulation of the 
lagoons which run most of the way from the Cohdlle to Flaxman 
Island, and his sounding of the various channels ; with the result 
that ships which formerly had to keep entirely outside of the chain 
of low islands which here flanks the coast, can now in many cases 
go between the islands and the coast protected by them from the 
danger of heavy ice that lies outside. The ships can thus now 
make their way through the open water of the lagoon, where in 
former times, before the lagoon was sounded, they would have had 
to remain tied up to an ice cake outside, unable to proceed and exposed 
to the dangers of the pack. 

There was with Mr. Leffingwell at Flaxman Island Mr. " Scotty " 
Mclntyre, an old miner and whaleman, who had been assisting Mr. 
Leffingwell in his work and who intended the following year to take 
Mr. Leffingwell's yawl Argo eastward to Victoria Island, where he 
hoped to make their joint fortune in trading with the Eskimo of 
Prince Albert Sound. 

After spending several days pleasantly at Flaxman Island we 
proceeded a short half day westward to where there was camped with 
his family Mr. Ned Arey, prospector, whom we also knew of old 
and who has been in these parts for the better portion of the last 
twenty years. He also was planning to go to the eastward, a thing 
which is really true of practically every white man on the north coast 
of Alaska, for Arctic Alaska has the last ten years become "poor 
country" through the depletion of its resources by the extermination 
of the caribou. 

I have always enjoyed visiting Ned Arey, and now I had a special 
reason for lingering at his camp as well as at Flaxman Island, because 
my only companion, Natkusiak, had been taken with a felon of the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 381 

left hand, which prevented him from doing any work with it (and 
that meant practically inability to do work at all, for he happens to 
be left-handed). The hand had for some days been so painful that 
not only was he unable to do anything, but he suffered great pain 
in walking or in sitting on the sled even where the going was excep- 
tionally smooth. By the time we left Mr, Arey's, which was in the 
course of two or three days, he had so far improved as to be able to 
walk along without it paining him much. 

Mr, Leffingwell at Flaxman Island had offered us as much of 
everything in the way of provisions as we cared to haul with us, but 
the season was not advancing with anything like the rapidity pre- 
dicted for it at Herschel Island, and I rather preferred to go slowly 
so as not to arrive at Point Barrow while all the population were 
still off on the ice, whaling. It would suit us best, I thought, to get 
there about the time that every one would be returning from the ice, 
and if we meant to loiter by the way we might as well spend part of 
the time in hunting, so I decided to prefer hunting seals for food 
on the way westward to taking a large amount of provisions from 
LeflBngwell, I never liked hauling more food than was necessary, 
and we knew there were bound to be seals on the ice. 

I had often shot seals before, of course, but this was really the 
first experience I had in having to do the whole thing ; that is, not 
only to kill the animals but also to cut them up, feed the dogs, boil 
the meat, pitch the camp, and everything. When we travelled to- 
gether, Natkusiak and I alone, it often fell to me to pitch camp, but 
the cutting up of seals and the feeding of the dogs had always been 
his portion of the work. 

When we came to the crossing of Harrison Bay I decided to strike 
straight across from Jones Islands to Cape Halkett. This was a 
wider crossing than we had ever made before and one quite beyond 
the practice of the Eskimo, who always follow the land around the 
foot of any big bight, although it is farther. In fact, Natkusiak was 
considerably worried. I never knew him to show timidity in the 
matter of going into an unknown country where the game conditions 
were uncertain, but on this occasion as well as on the previous one 
of our crossing of Dolphin and Union Straits (in May of the year 
before) he had been plainly worried. On this present crossing we 



382 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

used no compass, but depended upon the snow-drifts made by the 
southeasterly winds, crossing them all the way approximately at an 
angle of 45°, doing which would, I knew, bring us across to Cape Hal- 
kett in the course of three or four days. 

We travelled slowly (it was thick weather and there were plenty 
of seals for food) , so it was on the fifth day from the Jones (sometimes 
miscalled Thetis) Islands that we sighted land again. It turned out 
that our course, had the weather been thicker so that land could not 
have been seen at a distance, would have taken us only about three 
miles outside of Cape Halkett, which was pretty good for travel 
by dead reckoning across a sixty-mile bay in thick weather, and shows 
that the drifted snow makes a fairly good compass. There would 
have been no harm in missing the cape by a few miles, except that 
had fog or a blizzard hidden the land from us for a long time we 
should, had we kept our course, have been compelled to travel 
through some rough ice, whereas it would have been smoother over 
the shallow water near shore. Of course it is true that had we not 
sighted land at the time we did we should have turned inshore 
anyway soon after, for our reckoning of the distance was about 
right and I felt sure we must be abreast of the Cape or beyond it. 

Spring was coming on with fair rapidity, and geese and ducks were 
beginning to fly. We had, contrary to our general custom, taken with 
us a shotgun from Herschel Island, for this was an easy trip and we 
could afford to carry heavy and comparatively inefficient ammuni- 
tion. It was easy enough for us to get as many seals as we wanted 
any day at this season, but we preferred a change of food, especially 
as geese were even easier to get than seals. 

At this season (first part of June) and on this particular coast-line 
the sea ice is of course snow-white and so is the land back from the 
shore, but the cut banks along the beach are dark. The migrating 
geese coming from the west follow the dark line of the cut bank as 
cows do a winding trail. If there be a very narrow bight, they may fly 
across it ; if there be a slender point of land sticking out to seaward, 
they may cross over ; but in general they follow the coast so closely 
that you can sit down almost anywhere and rely on it that three 
flocks out of every four will pass within gunshot. This is especially 
true in thick or foggy weather. The geese we saw were chiefly the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 383 

American white-fronted. This is the commonest variety at Point 
Barrow. The Hutchins goose, which is fairly common about the 
Mackenzie and east of it, almost never comes to Point Barrow. In all 
his stay there since 1884 Mr. Brower has seen only three specimens, 
one of which was brought in at a time when I happened to be present. 

When we came to Pitt Point we had a better opportunity than ever 
before of seeing the curious formation of " ground ice." The cut bank 
here is anywhere from five to twenty or more feet in height, and in many 
places the face of the cliff shows a series of what appear to be boulders 
of ice imbedded in the wall of the cut bank somewhat as stones are in 
earth in other places. These may vary in size from that of a walnut 
to that of a load of hay. Sometimes the boulders look "dirty," 
but usually they are of ice that is clear white. Where the cut bank 
is as much as sixteen feet in height the base is always exposed, for 
this ice does not seem to go deep down. If a particular boulder 
goes within twenty inches or so of the surface, the top of it is flat, 
apparently through thawing, but otherwise it may be any shape. 
Overlying the ice there is always a certain amount of earth (any- 
where from eight to twenty inches). 

It is scarcely worth while to theorize much about how these boul- 
ders of ice came to be imbedded in the earth of the Alaskan coastal 
plain. Similar formations have been described by Dr. Bruce from 
Spitzbergen, Tyrell from the plains back of Hudson Bay, and Leffing- 
well from Flaxman Island, and no doubt by a great many others, 
although photographs showing the ice in position are, I believe, rare. 
It is probable that the method of formation was not the same in 
all places. There is a natural temptation to call upon the "great 
ice age" for an explanation, for it seems to be a sort of universal 
solvent of geological mysteries. It may be worth while, however, 
to describe certain activities which are seen at work on the north 
coast of Alaska to-day which are by themselves competent, apparently, 
to produce such conditions as are shown by our photographs. 

In the autumn, if the weather is calm, the sea freezes over near 
the coast line level as a pond. If an offshore wind blows, this level 
ice is carried off to seaward at any time during the winter, and so 
soon as the next calm comes it is replaced by a fresh layer of level ice ; 
but if an onshore wind blows, the ice is crushed against the beach 



384 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

by the force of the wind and forms in what are known as pressure 
ridges far out to sea. Each hummock of ice sticks above the general 
level, and each pressure ridge acts as a sail, under the combined wind- 
driven force of which the sea ice is, in a landward storm, forced against 
the beach with a power incomprehensible. Under such conditions 
tongues of ice may slip up on the beach and be shoved inland two or 
three hundred feet beyond the limit of high tide and thirty or forty 
feet above sea level. This is a common phenomenon. A rather less 
common one, but by no means rare, is that the tongue of ice is stabbed 
like a dagger into the ground. When the ice thaws the following 
summer and drifts away to seaward, these daggers are broken ofip 
in the wound, as it were, and left behind, covered with more or less 
earth according to the circumstances of the case. I have seen this 
happen on the gravel beach between Cape Smythe and Point Bar- 
row and on the first sandspit east of Pitt Point. At Point Barrow 
the covering of the ice chunks was of gravel, through which the sum- 
mer rains easily trickled, with the result that in the course of two 
or three years the ice melted within the gravel, which may still be 
seen there in heaps on the beach. But on the sandspit east of Pitt 
Point the covering was partly peaty earth, and a half dozen inches of 
it will prevent any ice underneath from thawing forever. 

The north coast of x'^.laska is at present a wasting coast, so that 
though a piece of ice be left imbedded in the earth and protected by 
it sufficiently from the heat of the sun to keep it from thawing, it 
is nevertheless a question of but a few years until the waves will 
break away that part of the beach and carry off the ice as well as the 
earth that covers it. But if the coast were a growing coast instead of 
a wasting one, if it were now in the process of upbuilding, then it may 
be said to be a certainty that the ice dagger left behind on the beach 
east of Pitt Point would remain there imbedded in the earth until 
the geological cycle of upbuilding had ceased and the sea finally 
uncovered it again in a new cycle of aggressiveness. 

There is no doubt, too, that in an analogous way underground ice 
may be formed by a meandering river. Let the ice first form and 
then be covered by a spring freshet with a few inches of earth, to be 
added to next year by a few more inches. As the river meanders 
to the left so as to leave behind it on its right bank chunks of ice, they 




Sections of Underground Ice Bowlders exposed in Cutbank, Pitt Point. 
Icicles complicate the outlines somewhat. 




One Method of Formation of Underground Ice. 
A dagger of ice is stabbed into bank and broken off, leaving ice covered by a heap of dirt. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 385 

are here and there imbedded in the earth, exactly as sticks of wood 
are nowadays, and exactly, no doubt, as the mammoth were in their 
day covered, to be preserved to our time so that their flesh is still flesh 
in the earth after unknown thousands of years. 

By the time we reached Smith Bay many kinds of Arctic birds had 
become fairly numerous. We saw the first jaegers May 31st, and 
while coming across Harrison Bay we had seen old squaw ducks 
three days before that. The first plovers were seen June 4th coming 
landward from what had no doubt been a short excursion out over 
the ice. All the rest of the birds were coming from the west along the 
coast. The first eider-ducks appeared June 4th and the first sand- 
pipers June 5th. The brant appeared in large flocks June 2d. The 
first American white-fronted geese were seen May 31st and waveys 
two days later. No swans or cranes were seen at any time. 

June 9th Natkusiak was taken with a bad case of snow-blindness. 
In general the Eskimo seem far more susceptible to snow-blindness 
than white men. Doubtless this is not a racial question. The reason 
is pretty clear — a man who has never had snow-blindness does 
not easily get it, but when you have had it once you get it more 
easily the next time and so on indefinitely until middle age. Men 
who have been exposed to it from childhood are very prone to the 
affliction. 

It would be natural to suppose that the light most trying to 
the eyes would be the intense glare on spotless snow when the sun 
stands high in a cloudless sky. This is not the case, however. The 
most trying is hazy weather when the sun shines through thin clouds. 
This is the sort of weather that makes it very difficult to gauge the dis- 
tance of objects or to discern inequalities in the surface over which 
you are walking, for the light is so uniformly diffused that no shadows 
are cast. Doubtless it is the extra strain on the eye in its effort to 
see things clearly under difficulties which brings on snow-blindness 
quickly under these conditions. 

It is extremely important, in trying to avoid snow-blindness, not 
only to wear goggles (as discussed elsewhere) that properly protect 
the eyes in the daytime, but also to sleep in a dark place at night. 
Apparently that is because the light penetrates to the eyes through the 
closed eyelids. A tent of such material as white balloon silk, for 
2c 



386 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

instance, is very trying. We were using such a tent on the present 
journey. As soon as Natkusiak became snow-bUnd we not only 
ceased traveling, but covered the tent outside with blankets and 
skins so as to make it dark. With this treatment he recovered almost 
completely in two days. 

On the last week of our journey toward Point Barrow we had fresh 
evidences of the food prejudices of dogs. Most of our team came 
from the Eskimo of Coronation Gulf, and in that country, where even 
the bolas is unknown, geese, naturally, are seldom killed. Since 
before reaching Pitt Point we had had no meat except geese, and 
all of the Coronation Gulf dogs at first refused to eat. One of them, 
Ivarluk by name, went for a week without eating, and prowled 
around looking for rags and ropes to swallow when pieces of goose 
were scattered all about. Finally, on the seventh day, he ate the bill 
of a goose and a portion of the front part of the head, although he re- 
fused even then the meat proper. I meant to starve him into sub- 
mission, but we got to Point Barrow too soon, for there seal meat 
and whale abounded, while the few geese we had with us when we 
arrived were too much in demand as man food for any attempt to 
force them on an unwilling dog. 

It was on June 13th that we arrived at the house of Tom Gordon, 
three miles north of Cape Smythe, We had miscalculated the whal- 
ing season. The whalers had all been back for more than a week. 
There is scarcely need to say that we were in a way glad to get to 
Cape Smythe, which to our eyes was the heart of civilization. Really 
it was not so much that we had been hungering for the comfort and 
softness of the civilized man's rather tame existence — it was rather 
that we had two months ago already turned our backs upon the serious 
work of the North. Our task, in a way, was completed, and it 
seemed as if we now were home and had a right to rest. Many of the 
people of Cape Smythe were old friends and some were good friends 
though not very "old," for friendships seem more easily made and 
less. easily outgrown here on the ragged edges of the world than in 
the crowded and distracted cities. 

I should have liked to stay with Mr. Gordon for the day at least, 
but he said, and I knew it was true, that Mr. Brower and the rest down 
at Cape Smythe village would expect me to look them up without 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 387 

delay. We accordingly left Natkusiak and the dog team behind, and 
Mr. Gordon walked with me down to Cape Smythe, where I found 
at the whaling station not only my old friends, Mr. and Mrs. Brower 
and Mr. John Hadley, but also Mr. James Clarke, who, although not 
a stranger in the Arctic, had come to Cape Smythe after my leaving 
it in 1909. At the Presbyterian Mission, too, were friends of earlier 
years, Dr. and Mrs. Marsh and their family. , Mr. and Mrs. Hawkes- 
worth I was sorry not to see. They had left the government school 
for more southerly fields of work and their places had been taken by 
Mr. and Mrs. Cram. The Eskimo girl, Koodlalook, who had helped 
me so materially with my work four years before, had gone south 
with the Hawkesworths, and her place in the school had been taken 
by another young Eskimo woman, Alice. 

There were two months to be spent at Cape Smythe, for the 
revenue cutter Bear, with which I intended to take passage for the 
outside world, could not be expected to arrive before August. I 
knew that as the guest of Mr. Brower I would find this time pass 
pleasantly and quickly, but I was anxious to turn it to profit also, and 
this I was able to do with Mr, Brower's assistance. 

The people of the two villages of Cape Smythe and Point Barrow, 
nearly five hundred in number, had had a rather unprofitable winter. 
Few foxes had been caught and only six whales all together in the spring 
whaling season, and the price of whalebone was lower than it had been 
for years. The day has long gone when the Point Barrow people are 
economically independent. There was a time when they got from 
their own land and ice-covered sea all their food, clothing, fuel, and 
the other necessities of life ; but now they import tea, clothing, phono- 
graphs, jewelry, chewing gum, perfumeries, and a hundred other 
things of which they formerly knew no need. They must therefore 
have money with which to buy these things, and the money they get 
only from foxskins and whalebone. Just now they were in great 
need of many things which they were used to doing without ; notably 
there was a chewing gum famine, and men, women, and children were 
willing to do anything to get a little gum. When therefore Mr. 
Brower put at my disposal the unlimited credit of his firm and the 
resources of his storehouse, and when I announced that I was willing 
to pay in chewing gum for the excavation of the native village sites 



388 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

of the neighborhood, every one from the children to the most decrepit 
turned out to help me in the work. 

It was a small army tha,t turned out to dig wherever there was a 
ruin or a kitchen midden, and they worked energetically and well. 
While the excavations were not done as methodically and scientifi- 
cally as could have been wished, still we were able to get from them a 
collection of over 20,000 archseological specimens within the space 
of six weeks. This collection (which is now safely stored in the 
American Museum of Natural History) brings out many signifi- 
cant and some revolutionary ideas with regard to the prehistoric 
history of the Eskimo. My method was to dig as much as possible 
myself, and to go around as best I could to see the others at work. 
In many cases I was able to see the exact position from which the 
important finds were taken. 

Not only Mr. Brower's whaling station was put at my disposal 
in which to assort, pack, and label the specimens, but also the govern- 
ment schoolhouse and Mr. Cram's residence, which was for several 
weeks littered with archseological finds and the dirt and debris 
which crumbled from them. Such time as I had free from these 
archaeological activities I devoted to linguistic work with the useful 
and able assistance of Dr. Marsh, who in thirteen years of residence 
among the Eskimo at Cape Smythe has acquired a mastery of the 
Point Barrow dialect. 

July 24th the first ship of the season arrived, the Elvira, owned by 
Schroder and Arliss, both of whom were aboard, and under the com- 
mand of Captain C. T. Pedersen. The weather was favorable for 
getting to the eastward, and as she was anxious to reach the Beaufort 
Sea for the summer whaling she did not drop anchor at all at Cape 
Smythe, although she stopped for a few hours at Point Barrow. The 
Elvira brought us the news of the wreck of the Titanic. As for that, 
I was getting fairly well abreast of the times, for there are three mails 
a year at Point Barrow and Mr. Brower keeps fairly well informed of 
what is going on in the outside world. 

The Elvira told us that she was the only whaling ship going into 
Beaufort Sea this year on account of the low price of whalebone 
(due to the discovery of the satisfactory commercial substitute hitherto 
mentioned). It was supposed, however, that one or two ships might 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 389 

come up as far as Point Barrow, and a few days later one of these, the 
John and Winthrop, hove in sight. She was commanded by another 
old whaleman friend of mine, Captain Joseph. There are no whales 
around Point Barrow this season of the year, and the John and 
Winthrop merely cast anchor a few miles offshore and stayed there 
for the entire remainder of my visit at Cape Smythe. 

A small gasoline trading schooner also came up and passed to the 
eastward. She was under the command of and owned by Captain 
Chris Sten, one of the oldest whalers in these waters and a man at 
whose camp I had several times visited during the winter of 1906- 
1907, when he was living at Shingle Point, about twenty miles west 
of the Mackenzie River. This is the same Mr. Sten whom Amund- 
sen mentions in his "Northwest Passage" as wintering at King 
Point the same year as the Gjoa. 

August 12th the revenue cutter Bear arrived off Cape Smythe, 
and the evening of the 13th she set sail back towards Nome, carrying 
me with her. The voyage, which ended at Nome August 18th, was 
rendered especially pleasant for me through the kindness of Captain 
J. G. Ballinger and his officers. They were not only courteous, as 
one would expect gentlemen of the revenue service to be, but they 
put themselves out especially in many ways in my service. An 
especially good fortune was that through the kindness of Lieutenant 
Philip H. Scott I was able, in a stay of a few short hours at Point 
Hope, to obtain there archaeological collections which form a useful 
supplement to those I had secured at Point Barrow. Lieutenant 
Scott had for many years taken an interest in such matters, and 
through his acquaintance with the natives I was able to secure many 
valuable specimens which it would otherwise have been impossible 
for me to get. 

When we dropped anchor off Nome, August 18th, it was in the 
dark of night ; and the lights of the city flickering on the hillsides and 
reflected against the sky gave this famous gold mining camp a metro- 
politan appearance which struck my imagination much more forcibly 
than did the great city of Seattle when we landed there from the 
passenger steamer some three weeks later. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

ON THE RELIGION OF THE ESKIMO 

ONE often hears the statement that there never have been 
discovered people so low that they do not have some form 
of religion. This is stating a true thing in such a way 
that it implies an untruth. The case is put rightly and the exact 
facts are truly implied, in saying that the lower you go in the scale of 
cultural development the more religion you find until, when you get 
to the people that are really toward the bottom of the scale of social 
and intellectual evolution, religion begins to cover practically all the 
activities and phenomena of life. There is a religious significance in 
every act and accident and a religious formula for every eventuality 
in life. 

The Eskimo are people whose intelligence is keen with reference 
to the facts of their immediate environment ; but that environment 
is so monotonous, the range of possible experiences is so small, that 
no matter what the fiber of their minds may be at bottom, the exer- 
cise is wanting that might lead to a broad mental development. 

There was a time when I used to think I knew what the word 
"savage" meant. Since then I have associated with people who 
dress in skins, who live largely on raw meat, who had never seen 
white men until they saw me, who were as strange to our ideas and 
ways as any people on this earth can be to-day ; and the net result 
is that the word "savage" has quite lost its meaning. Like the 
word "squaw," or "half-breed," the word "savage" is reprehensible 
because it carries a stigma which the facts do not justify. I should 
prefer to describe the peoples ordinarily referred to as "savage," 
as "child-like," because the w^ord is truthfully descriptive and not 
odious. It is the purpose of the present chapter to describe some 
phases of the religion of one of the child-like peoples. 

To begin with, the Eskimo are very unclear in their religious 

390 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 391 

thinking, a fact which does not, however, differentiate them abysmally 
from our own race. Scepticism in religious matters is unknown. If 
they are acquainted with my private character and find me in the 
ordinary relations of life reliable; if I don't tell lies concerning 
the number or the fatness of the caribou I have killed, nor about the 
distance at which I shot them, nor the difficulty I had in stalking 
them, they will believe anything I say about any subject. They will 
assume as unquestioningly the truth of any metaphysical statement 
I make if they have once learned to rely on my statements regarding 
the thickness of the back-fat of the bull caribou I shot during the 
summer. On the other hand, if I told them there were ten caribou 
in a band I saw and they later on discovered there were only five, 
they would be disinclined to believe me if I told them there was but 
one God. The reasoning would simply be this : he did not tell us 
the truth about the number of caribou, therefore how can we rely on 
the truth of his statements about the number of the gods ? 

There are among all Eskimo certain persons whom we call 
"shamans" and they call "angatkut." These persons hold com- 
munion with the spirits and are familiar with the things of the other 
world; they are the formulators of religious opinion. The days of 
miracles are not yet past among any primitive people, and new mir- 
acles happen on the shores of the polar sea daily, but more especially 
in the dark of winter. The miracles usually happen at the behest of 
the shamans, and invariably it is the shaman who tells about them ; 
but while new revelations are frequent, they are always revelations 
of the old sort. There is little originality in the minds of primitive 
people ; their daily experiences are uniform, and their thoughts are 
uniform, too. 

The most fundamental thing in Eskimo religion is that all phenom- 
ena are controlled by spirits and these spirits in turn are controlled 
by formulae, or charms, which are mainly in the possession of the 
medicine-men, although certain simple charms may be owned and 
used by any one. It follows from this fundamental conception that 
nothing like prayer or worship is possible. Supplication will do no 
good, for why should you beg anything from spirits that you can 
command ? All spirits can be controlled, and in fact are controlled, 
by charms ; but certain spirits are especially at the service of certain 



392 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

men, and these men are the shamans. They may be male or female, 
and in fact some of the greatest shamans known to me are women. 

As we have said, the religious thinking of the Eskimo is un- 
clear. There seems no agreement, and in fact no settled opinion 
on the subject of whether there are spirits, of the class susceptible 
of becoming familiar spirits, which are not already in the service of 
some shaman. The general feeling seems to be that every one of 
these spirits has its master. For that reason, among the Mackenzie 
River people, at least, when a young man wants to become a shaman 
he must, in one way or another, secure a spirit from some one who is 
already a shaman, or else secure a spirit that has been freed by the 
death of a shaman. 

The ordinary Mackenzie River shaman has about half a dozen 
familiar spirits, any of which will do his bidding. When engaged 
in some such thing as the finding of a hidden article, the shaman will 
summon these spirits, one after another, and send them out separately 
in search of the lost article. Evidently a man may be able to get 
along fairly well with five familiar spirits, though he may be in the 
habit of employing six, exactly as we can dispense with an extra 
servant. A shaman may be old and decrepit or for some other 
reason may be what we should call "hard up." This is a propitious 
occasion for some ambitious young man to obtain a familiar spirit. 
He will go to the old shaman and some such conversation as this will 
take place : 

"Will you sell me one of your keyukat?" (that being the Macken- 
zie River name for familiar spirit). 

"Yes. I don't see why I might not. I am getting to be an old 
man now and shall not need their services much longer; besides, I 
have had my eye on you for a long time and shall be glad to have 
you for my successor. I think I might let you have my Polar Bear 
spirit." 

" That would be kind of you, but don't you think you could spare 
your Tide Crack spirit ? " 

" Well, no ; that is the one that I intend to keep to the very last. 
It has been very faithful to me and useful, but if you don't like the 
Polar Bear spirit you might have my Indian spirit." 

And so the bargaining goes on, until finally it is decided that the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 393 

young man buys the Raven spirit for an umiak freshly made of five 
beluga skins, twenty summer-killed-deer skins, two bags of seal oil, 
a green stone labret, and things of that sort without end — giving 
a new boat, in fact, loaded with all sorts of gear. 

The young man now goes home, and presently, using the appro- 
priate formula given him by the shaman, he summons his familiar 
spirit, but the familiar spirit refuses to appear. The young man then 
goes back to the old shaman and says to him : " How is this ? The 
spirit which you sold me has not come." And tiie old man replies : 
" Well, I cannot help that ; I transferred him to you in good faith, 
and if you are one of those persons with whom spirits refuse to as- 
sociate, that is a thing which I cannot help. I did my part in the 
matter." 

That is the consensus of opinion in the community. The shaman 
has transferred the spirit in good faith and has kept his part of the 
contract and consequently keeps the boat and everything else with 
which the young man has paid for the spirit. Further, when it 
becomes noised about that this young man is the sort of a man 
with whom spirits will not associate, he loses social standing, for 
it becomes evident not only that he will never become a great sha- 
man, but also that he is lacking in those essential personal qualities 
which commend him to the spirits, and which therefore commend 
him to his fellow-countrymen also. 

In our hypothetical case we have supposed the young man to go 
back to the shaman to complain over the non-arrival of the spirit. 
As a matter of fact it is only once or twice in a generation that such 
a thing takes place. Wlien he has once publicly paid for the spirit, 
the young man has everything to lose by admitting that he did not 
receive it. He cannot get back what he paid for it ; he cannot have 
the advantage of being considered a shaman ; and he will lose social 
standing through the publication of the fact that the spirit refuses 
to associate with him. As a matter of practice, therefore, the pur- 
chaser will pretend that he received the spirit, and he will announce 
that fact. Some time later sickness occurs in a family or a valuable 
article is lost. The young man is appealed to, and in order to keep 
up the deception which he has begun by pretending to have received 
the spirit, he goes into as good an imitation of a trance as he can 



394 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

manage, for he has from childhood up watched the shamans in their 
trances. If he succeeds in the cure or whatever the object of the 
seance may be, his reputation is made ; and if he does not succeed 
nothing is lost, for it is as easy for an Eskimo to explain the failure of 
a shamanistic performance as it is for us to explain why a prayer is 
not answered. It may have been because some other more powerful 
shaman was working against him, or it may have been for any one 
of a thousand reasons, all of which are satisfactory and suflScient to 
the Eskimo mind. 

In general, among the Mackenzie Eskimo there are two main 
theories of disease : either a man's soul has been stolen, in which case 
the symptoms are chills, shivering, and a general lassitude; or a 
spirit may have been sent by an ill-disposed shaman into another 
person to make him sick. In this latter case the symptoms will be 
anything at all and the treatment is exorcism, to drive out the evil 
spirit that has taken possession — or not really an evil spirit, for 
according to Eskimo ideas the spirits are neither good nor evil in 
themselves, but merely perform the good or evil bidding of those who 
send them. 

There are various methods of exorcism, usually including chanting, 
drum-beating, conjuring tricks, ventriloquism, and the like, on the 
part of the shaman, and the observance of taboos on the part of the 
sick man and his relatives, and occasionally on the part of an entirely 
unrelated person arbitrarily designated by the shaman. A child 
will be eventually cured if its mother refrains from changing her 
socks as long as the illness lasts, or the disease will be aggravated if 
the sick man's brother should eat any portion of the left side of 
caribou. 

The procedure in the case of a soul being stolen is a simpler one. 
The problem is merely to find the soul and restore it to the sick per- 
son, and all the shaman has to do is to summon his familiar spirits 
and send them out over all the earth in search of the place where the 
soul has been forcibly confined. Eventually one of the spirits will 
find the soul, unless indeed it has been craftily placed in some cavity 
or hole the mouth of which has been greased with seal or whale oil, 
for in that case neither will the soul be able to pass out of such a 
confinement nor will the spirit which is searching for the soul be able 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 395 

to enter in order to find it. When a shaman steals a man's soul and 
wants to be sure that no other shaman shall be able to recover it 
for him, the favorite hiding-place is one of the foramina of the lower 
maxillary bone of the bow-head whale. 

Most travellers who have visited the Arctic lands have commented 
upon the fact that Eskimo children are never punished, or, in fact, 
forbidden anything. The explanations offered have been various, 
and usually such offhand ones as the "common sense" of the observer 
has suggested to him. In dealing with primitive people, however, 
"common sense" is an exceedingly dangerous thing. It is a frail 
reed indeed to rely upon, for scarcely anything that the primitive 
man does is done without a religious motive, and we in these later 
days are so prone to neglect the religious aspect of things that the 
chances are necessarily small of the right reason being divined. We 
count it as one of the chief triumphs of the four-year expedition of 
the American Museum of Natural History to the Eskimo that we 
discovered why it is that children are not punished — for such im- 
material things is the money of scientific institutions expended ! 

One family of Eskimo were the servants of the expedition for its 
whole four years and I had known them also on a previous expedition. 
This family consists of the man Ilavinirk, his wife Mamayak, and 
their daughter Noashak. When I first knew Noashak I formed the 
opinion that she was the worst child I had ever known and I retained 
that opinion for over six years, or until she was a young woman of 
perhaps twelve years. (Some Eskimo girls are fully developed at 
the age of twelve or thirteen.) In spite of her badness Noashak was 
never punished. 

The two stock explanations of why Eskimo do not punish their 
children are : first, that the children themselves are so good that they 
do not need being punished (but that scarcely applied to Noashak's 
case) ; or that the Eskimo are so fond of their children that they 
cannot bear to punish them, which is not true, either, for they show 
in many ways that they are no fonder of their children than we are. 

During the entire time that Noashak's family was with us she was 
the undisputed ruler of our establishment. My plan of work was 
such that I could not get along without the help of Eskimo, and I 
had continually before me the choice of doing as Noashak wanted or 



396 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

else losing the services of her parents. They were both excellent 
people of whom I was personally very fond, and they were more useful 
to me than any one else whom I could hope to secure in their places ; 
besides, most Eskimo families have children, and to dispose of the 
family of which Noashak was head would only have compelled me to 
engage some other family of which some other child was master. True, 
I was allowed to decide upon the broad policy of the expedition, but 
any little details were liable to change without notice^ at Noashak's 
option. 

It was during the absence of the sun in December, 1909, that this 
family and I were travelling up Horton River. We had been several 
days without anything to eat except sea-oil ; our dogs were tired and 
weak from hunger and had ceased pulling. Ilavinirk and I were 
harnessed to the sled on either side, breaking our backs to pull it 
forward, and Mamayak was walking ahead breaking trail for the 
sled. Noashak, then a fat and sturdy girl of eight, was on top of the 
load, which was heavy enough in all conscience without her. When- 
ever we stopped to rest she would immediately jump off the sled, run 
up some cut-bank and slide down it, run up again and slide down 
again, and so on as long as we stayed. The moment we started she 
would jump on the load and ride. 

One day when her father and I were more tired than usual and 
getting weaker from long fasting, I asked Ilavinirk whether he did 
not think it would be a good idea if Noashak got off and walked a 
little (we had, by the way, saved food for Noashak so that she had 
something to eat when the rest of us did not). He put the matter 
to her, telling her that it was his opinion that walking would really 
do her good ; he told her how tired he and I were getting, and wanted 
to know if his dear daughter was not willing to walk now and then so 
as to enable us to travel a little farther each day and to reach our 
destination, where plenty of food waited for us, that much sooner. 
But she said she did not feel like walking, and that ended the dis- 
cussion. 

Later on when we stopped to rest again and Noashak started her 
old tactics of running uphill and sliding down, I again suggested 
to her father that she might rest while we rested and then she would 
no doubt feel like walldng when we started travelling again. He put 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 397 

the case to her as before. Evidently his sympathies were on my side 
and he was as anxious to have her walk as I was, but her curt decision 
that she would rather slide downliill than walk beside the sled 
settled the matter. 

I am unable to remember now whether I had any theory by which 
I explained to myself why it was that Noashak was never forbidden 
anything and never punished, but I know now that if I had a theory 
it must have been a wrong one. As a matter of fact, I do not think 
I had one. I am afraid I took Noashak for granted, as a sort of 
necessary evil, like mosquitoes. It was only in February or March, 
1912, that I got the key to the situation, and I found it then to in- 
volve also that most interesting question of how it is that Eskimos 
get their names. 

I had noticed ever since I knew them that Mamayak in speaking 
to Noashak always addressed her as "mother." When one stops to 
think of it, it was of course a bit curious that a woman of twenty-five 
should address a girl of eight as "mother." I suppose, if I thought 
about the matter at all, I must have put this practice of theirs in the 
same category with that which we find among our own people, where 
we often hear a man addressing his wife as "mother." 

One day another Eskimo family came to visit us, and strangely 
enough, the woman of the family also spoke to Noashak and called 
her "mother." Then my curiosity was finally aroused, and I asked : 
"Why do you two grown women call this child your mother?" 
Their answer was: "Simply because she is our mother," an answer 
which was for the moment more incomprehensible to me than the 
original problem. I saw, however, that I was on the track of some- 
thing interesting, and both women were in a communicative mood, 
so it was not long until my questions brought out the facts, which 
(pieced together with what I already knew) make the following 
coherent explanation, which shows not only why these women called 
Noashak "mother," but shows also why it v/as that she must never 
under any circumstances be forbidden anything or punished. 

Wlien a Mackenzie Eskimo dies, the body is taken out the same 
day as the death occurs to the top of some neighboring hill and 
covered with a pile of drift-logs, but the soul {nappan) remains in 
the house where the death occurred for four days if it is a man, and 



398 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

for five days if it is a woman. At the end of that time a ceremony is 
performed by means of which the spirit is induced to leave the house 
and to go up to the grave, where it remains with the body waiting 
for the next child in the community to be born. 

When a child is born, it comes into the world with a soul of its own 
(nappan), but this soul is as inexperienced, foolish, and feeble as a 
child is and looks. It is evident, therefore, that the child needs a 
more experienced and wiser soul than its own to do the thinking for it 
and take care of it. Accordingly the mother, so soon as she can 
after the birth of the child, pronounces a magic formula to summon 
from the grave the waiting soul of the dead to become the guardian 
soul of the new-born child, or its atka, as they express it. 

Let us suppose that the dead person was an old wise man by the 
name of John , The mother then pronounces the formula which may 
be roughly translated as follows : " Soul of John, come here, come 
here, be my child's guardian ! Soul of John, come here, come here, 
be my child's guardian ! " (Most magic formulae among the Eskimo 
must be repeated twice.) 

When the soul of John, waiting at the grave, hears the summons 
of the mother, it comes and enters the child. From that time on it 
becomes the business of this acquired soul not only to do the think- 
ing for the child, but to help in every way to keep it strong and 
healthy : to assist it in learning to walk, to keep it from becoming 
bow-legged, to assist it in teething, and in every way to look after 
its welfare, things which the child's own soul with which it was born 
could not possibly do for the child, on account of its weakness and 
inexperience. 

The spirit of John not only teaches the child to talk, but after the 
child learns to talk it is really the soul of John which talks to you and 
not the inborn soul of the child. The child, therefore, speaks with 
all the acquired wisdom which John accumulated in the long lifetime, 
plus the higher wisdom which only comes after death. Evidently, 
therefore, the child is the wisest person in the family or in the com- 
munity, and its opinions should be listened to accordingly. What it 
says and does may seem foolish to you, but that is mere seeming and 
in reality the child is wise beyond your comprehension. 

The fact that the child possesses all the wisdom of the dead John 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 399 

is never forgotten by Its parents. If it cries for a knife or a pair of 
scissors, it is not a foolish child that wants the knife, but the soul of 
the wise old man John that wants it, and it would be presumptuous 
of a young mother to suppose she knows better than John what is 
good for the child, and so she gives it the knife. If she refused the 
knife (and this is the main point), she would not only be preferring 
her own foolishness to the wisdom of John, but also she would thereby 
give offense to the spirit of John, and in his anger John would abandon 
the child. Upon the withdrawal of his protection the child would 
become the prey to disease and would probably die, and if it did not 
die, it would become stupid or hump-backed or otherwise deformed 
or unfortunate. John must, therefore, be propitiated at every cost, 
and to deliberately offend him would be in fact equivalent to desiring 
the child's misfortune or death and would be so construed by the 
community ; so that a man is restrained from forbidding his child or 
punishing it, not only by his own interest in the child's welfare, but 
also by the fear of public opinion, because if he began to forbid his 
child or to punish it, he would at once become known to the com- 
munity as a cruel and inhuman father, careless of the welfare of his 
child. 

We can see here how much there is in the point of view. On the 
basis of this explanation it is easy to understand how a man, tired 
and hungry and at the limit of his strength, would still haul his 
daughter on top of the sled load rather than compel her to get off 
and walk, for to compel her to do so would have been equivalent to 
desiring to bring upon her serious misfortune, if not death, through 
giving offense to her guardian angel. 

Among the Mackenzie River Eskimo, if you see a man who is 
bow-legged, or hump-backed, or whose ears are big, and if you ask 
any one why he is bow-legged or hump-backed, the answer will 
usually be : " It is because his parents forbade him things when he 
was young and offended his guardian spirit." 

As the child grows up the soul with which he was born (the nap- 
pan) gradually develops in strength, experience, and wisdom, so that 
after the age of ten or twelve years it is fairly competent to look after 
the child and begins to do so ; at that age it therefore becomes of less 
vital moment to please the guardian spirit (atka), and accordingly 



400 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

it is customary to begin forbidding children and punishing them when 
they come to the age of eleven or twelve years. People say about 
them then : " I think the nappan is competent now to take care of 
him and it will be safe to begin teaching him things." 

In the case of Noashak the transition period arrived in February, 
1912. For four or five months before that it had been known to her 
parents and to all of us that she was beginning to chew tobacco. 
She used to steal it wherever she could find it. Her parents and I 
moralized with her on the subject ; we told her that the white people 
were now increasing in number in the community, that white men 
did not approve of girls chewing tobacco, and that she would be looked 
down upon for doing it. But she said she did not care what white 
men thought of her. The matter gave her parents a good deal of 
concern; they tried in every way to hide the tobacco so that she 
could not find it ; but she was ingenious, and considered it a personal 
triumph whenever she was able to assist any one toward the ap- 
parently accidental discovery of tobacco stains on her lips, for that 
was an evidence that she had outwitted her parents again. 

One day her parents discussed the matter with me, saying that I 
understood their point of view and that they therefore wanted my 
advice. I refrained from interfering much, however. They even- 
tually decided that Noashak's nappan was now approximately fully 
developed (Noashak was as big as her mother already) and so they 
thought they would try punishing her. The next time that she was 
caught chewing tobacco her father gave her another lengthy talk, 
urging her to stop the practice, but she only laughed at him, upon 
which he slapped her. To be struck was an undreamt-of thing in 
her philosophy. At first she was speechless with astonishment and 
then she started crying with rage and kept on crying all day, at the 
end of which she seemed to have thought the matter over carefully 
and to have realized that she was no longer ruler of the family. She 
accordingly stopped chewing. 

The natural consequence of the fact that it is the spirit of John 
that does the thinking and talking for the child is that the child is 
addressed as a relative by all the relatives of John (for it is indeed to 
John that they are talking). If John was my father and your uncle, 
then I speak to the child as father and you speak to it as uncle, ir- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 401 

respective of the child's age or sex. There was, for instance, a couple 
I knew who had for a child a boy of seven years, whose father called 
him stepmother and whose mother called him aunt, for those were 
their respective relationships to the woman whose soul was the boy's 
guardian, or atka. 

As Eskimo communities are small and the people are necessarily 
usually related in one way or another, it is common to find a child 
addressed as a relative by every person in the village. It is one of 
the child's earliest tasks to learn to recognize all these people and to 
address them by the proper terms of relationship, dealing with them 
in this matter entirely with reference to their relation to his guardian 
spirit. 

Still, as in other matters, the thinking of the Eskimo is unclear 
here, and there is no absolute mutual exclusion of the two relation- 
ships — ■ the child's relationship as we see it, on the one hand, and the 
relationship to the guardian spirit on the other, so that in speaking 
to you a man will say, "This is my daughter," although in speaking 
to her he may call her "nephew." He may also call her "daughter" 
and "nephew" alternately. A boy may therefore find himself in 
the position of being at once his father's son and his father's mother, 
which relationship he will of course find perfectly natural, being the 
one he has been brought up to recognize. 

The fact that children address all the other people of a village by 
terms of relationship has often been noted and has usually been ex- 
plained in a "common-sense" way by saying that Eskimo children 
are taught to be respectful to their elders and that as a sign of this 
r^espect they are instructed to address them by terms of relationship. 
This explanation is an eminently reasonable one to our minds, but 
does not happen to be true to the facts. 

A person may continue through his entire lifetime to address cer- 
tain individuals by the terms of relationship required by their position 
with regard to his guardian spirit, but as a usual thing the older a 
man gets the more this wears off and the more the real blood relation- 
ship begins to come forward. 

It appears from the foregoing that every man has two souls, the 
one with which he was born and the one he acquired immediately 
after birth. He may, in fact, have more souls than that. If three 
2d 



402 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

people, or thirteen, have just died before the child was born, then he 
gets three guardian spirits, or thirteen, according to the circumstances. 
But when he dies it is none of these acquired souls, but the soul that 
he was born with, which in its turn remains for four or five days in 
the house after death, which is then ceremonially driven out to the 
grave, and which waits there until it is summoned to become the 
second soul of a new-born child. No one knows what becomes of 
the guardian soul after the death of the persons whose guardians 
they have been. I have repeatedly asked about it, but no one seems 
to have ever heard the matter discussed and no one seemed to think 
the question was of great importance. 

This answers, then, the commonly asked questions : " What is 
the Eskimo's idea of a future life ? " " What has he that corresponds 
to heaven and hell?" He has nothing which corresponds to either 
heaven or hell. For four or five days after death the spirit remains 
in the house where the death occurred ; from then on it remains by 
the grave until it is summoned to enter a new-born child ; and from 
that time on until the death of the child the soul remains with it, 
unless it has been compelled to abandon it earlier, as would happen 
if the child were habitually punished. It is not known to the Mac- 
kenzie Eskimo what would happen to a soul in case it abandoned the 
person it was guarding. (As the guardian spirit is the atka of the 
child, so the child is the saunirk of the guardian spirit.) 

It happens sometimes that between the occurrence of one death 
and the occurrence of the next several children are born. Each of 
them can and does receive the soul of the dead man as his guardian. 
This is another case of the Eskimo's unclearness of thinking, for they 
seem to look upon each child as being the abode of the soul of the 
dead. How a single soul of a single man can, after his death, become 
three souls or thirteen, inhabiting simultaneously three children or 
thirteen children, is a metaphysical question in Eskimo theology. 
They cannot explain the fact, but they know it is so, which, after all, 
allies their metaphysics to those of other and more highly developed 
races. 

The fact that most things have a religious or supernatural ex- 
planation implies that few things have natural ones. The miracles 
of the Eskimo are like ours in being of supernatural origin, but they 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 403 

differ from ours In being of more frequent occurrence. It would sur- 
prise most of us to see miracles happening all around us. It is not so 
with the Eskimo. They expect them continually, and when any one 
tells of having seen or heard of a miraculous thing, there is only un- 
questioning belief, for it is but the narration of an expected occurrence 
and an ordinary one. 

Apparently miracles may happen at the instigation of uncon- 
trolled spirits, but certainly over ninety per cent of them are directly 
ascribed to the activities of a spirit controlled by some shaman. 

The list of the different kinds and characteristics of miracles would 
be too long to recite. We shall describe merely what, among Mac- 
kenzie River Eskimo at least, is the commonest of all miracles, the 
best understood and most universally vouched for — the spirit flight 
in which the actual body of the shaman flies to some distant place, 
sometimes to a neighboring village, often to a far country, and most 
frequently of all, to the sun, to the moon, or to the bottom of the sea. 
There is also another kind of spirit flight in which the body remains in 
its place and the soul alone goes abroad. These two sorts of spirit 
flights differ essentially in this : that while the first must be performed 
in darkness, the second can be managed in daylight. 

The bodily shamanistic flight takes place usually at night in 
winter and in the dark of the moon. The event is announced before- 
hand and all those who desire to be present gather in the clubhouse or 
the largest available private residence. As is always the case in the 
Mackenzie River houses, there is one window at the peak of the 
" cottage "-shaped roof, and directly under this, near the center of the 
floor, sits the shaman, usually wearing no clothes except knee- 
breeches, although he may be fully dressed. Two or three men who 
are skilled in the manipulation of ropes take a long thong and tie 
and truss the shaman until, humanly speaking, it is impossible for 
him to move. Usually one feature of the tying is that a bight of the 
rope is passed under his knees and over the back of his neck and the 
rope drawn tight until his chin rests between his knees. Wlien the 
tjdng is done, there is always left over a loose rope-end about three 
inches long to which is attached a stone or other heavy object, such 
as a hammer or an ax-blade. Before the beginning of the perform- 
ance the window has been covered with a thick skin or blanket. All 



404 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the people take their seats in a circle about the shaman as far away 
as possible from the center of the house, leaving him in an unoccu- 
pied circle of perhaps ten feet diameter. The lights are put out and 
the house is so dark that one can see absolutely nothing. Never- 
theless every one leans forward and closes his eyes tightly. If there 
are any children present, an older person sits behind each child and 
holds his hands over the child's eyes. 

The moment after the light goes out the shaman begins to chant a 
magic song. Presently he says : " I do not feel so heavy now as I 
usually do. Somehow it seems as if I were not sitting very heavily 
upon the floor. Now I am becoming as light as a feather. Now I 
am beginning to want to rise like a dry stick in water." All these 
things he says in a low and indefinite tone of voice, speaking well in 
his throat so that it is difficult to judge just how far away he is, but 
of course thus far every one knows exactly where he is, for he remains 
(by his own account) in the center of the circle where he was when the 
lights were put out. 

The next stage of the performance is that the shaman, still speak- 
ing in the manner of a ventriloquist, says : " Now I am beginning to 
rise ; now I am going to fly in circles slowly just above the floor ; now 
I am flying fast ; now I am flying faster." Presently the people begin 
to hear a whizzing noise. This is the stone or ax which was attached 
to the loose rope-end. The shaman is now flying in circles so fast 
that the centrifugal force makes the hammer on the rope-end produce 
a whizzing noise. If any one were to open his eyes even a little to 
try to see what was going on, the hammer would strike him in the 
head, killing him instantly. Consequently, the louder the whizzing 
noise the more tightly is every eye squeezed shut, and the more firmly 
are the hands of the parents held over the eyes of their children. 

While the hammer still continues the whizzing noise the voice of 
the shaman is heard to say : " Now I am rising above your heads ; 
now I am getting near the roof ; now I am about to pass out through 
the window." Then the voice grows actually fainter and fainter as 
the shaman rises toward the roof and flies out through the window, 
and finally the whizzing noise dies away in the distance. 

For half an hour or more the audience sits in absolute silence 
with eyes shut, and then is heard again the shaman's voice : " Now 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 405 

I am coming in through the window ; now I am settHng down ; now 
I am down on the floor ; now you may open your eyes and Ught the 
lamps." The lamps are lighted, and, lo ! there sits the shaman 
exactly where he was when the lights were put out three-quarters of 
an hour before. 

Some one now unties the shaman and he relates to an attentive 
audience his adventures on the spirit flight. He went to the moon 
and approached the house of the man in the moon. He did not dare 
to enter, but waited outside until the man in the moon's wife came 
out, saw him, and invited him in. Shortly after, the man in the 
moon himself came home from a caribou-hunt, bringing with him a 
back load of meat and a number of marrow bones. A meal was pre- 
pared of caribo"u meat, and after that the three of them cracked 
marrow-bones until the broken bones lay in a large heap on the floor. 
The man in the moon said that last year the caribou-hunt had not 
been very good in the moon, but this year it was much better ; the 
caribou in the moon this year were fatter than usual, which was no 
doubt due to the fact that the summer had been cool and there had 
not been very many mosquitoes. The man in the moon's wife also 
joined in the conversation, saying that they had already secured an 
abundance of skins for clothing for the coming winter, and that as for 
sinew with which to sew, they had enough already for two years. 
She inquired for the shaman's wife, whether his little boy had begun 
yet to kill ptarmigan, whether the people in the shaman's village care- 
fully kept all the taboos, and who it was that had broken some, for 
she knew from the vapor rising from the village that something was 
amiss. 

The shaman had answered her questions to the best of his ability. 
He regretted that a certain young woman had been very careless in 
sewing caribou skin soon after the killing of white whales, and various 
other things of this sort the shaman was compelled reluctantly to tell, 
for he was a truthful man and must speak out, although he was 
ashamed of his fellow-countrymen and would gladly have been able 
to conceal the facts from the moon people. 

Time is not measured the same way in the moon as upon earth, 
the shaman tells, and really he had been in the moon a long time, 
although on earth it seemed but a short while that he was away. He 



406 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

had lingered, feasted, and talked, but finally his visit was at an end, 
and he started off, promising the man in the moon to visit him again 
next year. 

When the shaman's narrative is over, a general discussion takes 
place, in which both men and women join, and finally when the crowd 
gets tired and sleepy they disperse to their own homes. 

This that we have described is not one of the most wonderful 
miracles, but merely the commonest one and the best attested. 
Some miracles, such as the walking on water, are of rare occurrence, 
and only a few people have seen them. Raising people from the 
dead is also a seldom thing. But every man and woman you meet 
can attest the genuineness of the spirit flight, for they have all been 
present when it was done. Besides that, such things are a matter of 
common knowledge among the people. You might as well try to 
convince an Englishman that balloon flights have never been taken 
in the British Isles as attempt to persuade an Eskimo that spirit 
flights have never occurred in the Mackenzie delta. 

One day when I was explaining to my Eskimo that there were 
mountains on the moon and going into details of the moon's phys- 
ical characteristics, the account I gave did not coincide with the 
opinion held by my Eskimo listeners, and they asked me how I knew 
these things were so. I explained that we had telescopes as long as 
the masts of ships and that through them we could see the things on 
the moon's surface. "But had any white man ever been to the 
moon ? " I was asked, and when I replied that no one ever had, they 
said that while they did not have any telescopes as long as ship's 
masts, yet they did have men, and truthful men, too, that had been 
to the moon, walked about there and seen everything, and they had 
come back and told them about it. With all deference to the in- 
genuity of white men, they thought that under the circumstances the 
Eskimo ought to be better informed than the white men as to the 
facts regarding the moon. 

It may seem to you that these that we have described are ex- 
traordinary and untenable views, and that it ought to be an easy 
thing to undeceive the men who hold them, but if you have ever tried 
to change the religious views of one of your own countrymen so as to 
make them coincide with yours, you will Imow that the knowledge 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 407 

that comes through faith is not an easy thing to shake, and if you 
want to appreciate such an attitude of mind as that of the Eskimo 
and cannot find an analogy among your own neighbors, I would 
recommend the reading of Mark Twain's A Yankee at the Court 
of King Arthur. It is one of the remarkable things about Mark 
Twain that he understood the minds of the intellectually primitive 
as few others have done — even of those who have made a study of 
such things. Mark Twain's Englishmen of King Arthur's time 
think such thoughts as I have found the Eskimo thinking in our own 
generation, and justify them in the manner in which the Esldmo 
justify theirs. If you were to try to displace from the minds of the 
Eskimo such beliefs as we have described, you would find (as I have 
found upon occasion) that you would succeed no better than did 
Mark Twain's Yankee in his crusade against Merlin. But if you con- 
cern yourself not with the unteaching of old beliefs but with the 
teaching of new ones, you will find an easy path before you. The 
Eskimo already believe many mutually contradictory things, and 
they will continue believing them while they gladly accept and de- 
voutly believe everything you teach them. They will (as the Chris- 
tianized Arctic Eskimo are in fact doing) continue believing all they 
used to believe and will believe all the new things on top of that. 

The belief in the spirit flight is as strong at Point Barrow after 
more than ten years of Christianity as the belief in witchcraft was in 
England after more than ten centuries of Christianity. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

ON THE CONVERSION OF THE HEATHEN 

OME friends of mine who travel in Africa are of the opinion 
that the greater part of black Africa is on the way toward 
becoming uniformly Mohammedan. They explain this by 
saying that the natives do not understand Christianity, but they 
do Mohammedanism ; that Mohammedanism seems adapted to 
local needs, and apparently is in Africa the right thing in the right 
place. 

A few years ago, when I was a student in a divinity school, I 
remember the professor of church history and allied subjects explain- 
ing how in Europe Christianity underwent local changes to suit 
itself to the environment and understanding of the different peoples 
as it spread northward during the early centuries of our era. It is, 
of course, a truism that every one of us must think in the terms 
of his own experience. "When I was a child, I thought as a child" 
applies also to the races who are really in the childhood stage of 
intellectual evolution. It ought to be self-evident, and really it is 
when one stops to think, that the Christianity of the cultured, club- 
frequenting, wealthy man of the city can never be quite the same as 
that of the farmer in the backwoods, for the thoughts of each and 
their outlook on life are colored by their associations; still it is 
apparently true that when the clubman writes out his check for 
foreign missions and the farmer drops his silver coin in the contri- 
bution-plate, each seems to think that the money is going to be spent 
to produce in the minds of distant savages exactly the type of Chris- 
tianity which the giver himself holds or which he is in the habit of 
hearing from his own pulpit. 

It has been my fortune at various times and in many lands to see 
several other religions besides Christianity in actual operation, and 
to see the operations of Christianity in a large assortment of environ- 
ments. The religious phenomena among primitive races are in 
general as fraught with human interest as any of the phases of 

408 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 409 

their lives, and the manifestations of the Christianity which they 
acquire from missionaries, or from already converted fellow-country- 
men of their own, should be quite as interesting to us as the native 
religion of these people — more interesting, in fact, through the 
circumstance that here we see familiar ideas in strange guise, and have 
before us phenomena which we are better able to understand than 
the purely native religions of races that differ antipodally from us 
in their outlook on life. 

One of the races which just now is being converted to Christianity 
is that of the Eskimo. Those of us interested in missions may have 
at our fingers' ends the statistics of the work : In such a year the 
missionary went to this or that district ; in so many years he made so 
many converts; religious services were regularly held; the results 
of the work are most gratifying. These things we can get out of the 
missionary reports, and we can hear them from lecture platforms 
and pulpits when in their sabbatical years the missionaries return 
to us to tell about their work and its results. I know of no case 
where there is any reason to doubt the accuracy of the report of these 
missionaries so far as outward facts are concerned. If they say 
that twenty-five have been baptized, you may take it for granted 
that twenty-five have been baptized. There is no reason to undertake 
an inquiry into these statistics. What we shall undertake — a 
thing which the missionary seldom attempts — is to examine the 
minds of the twenty-five converts and see just how much of a spiritual 
transformation the baptism has wrought, and under what form the 
teachings of the missionaries are now being treasured in their simple 
hearts. 

I have lived with the Eskimo until they have become as my own 
people. I pass my winters in their houses and my summers in their 
tents; I dress as they do, eat what they eat, and follow the game 
across the tundra to get my food exactly as they do, and I have come 
to feel that I understand them as well as I do my own people. My 
footing among them is antipodal to that of the missionary — he 
comes to teach, but I to learn. He tells them, "Don't do this" 
and " Don't do that," and the people soon learn what it is he approves 
of and of what he disapproves; but I merely look and listen, with 
interest, but without comment. They will show him the charac- 



410 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

teristics which they know are hkely to win his approbation, and they 
will keep from his knowledge the things he considers reprehensible; 
with me they take it for granted that I feel as they do — which, 
in fact, I do in many cases. In dealing with the missionary the 
Eskimo say "Aye, aye," and "Nay, nay," and they watch him out 
of the corners of their eyes to see whether they said "Aye" and 
"Nay" at the right time. The footing of the scientific student is 
also different from that of the whaler or trader who is not interested 
in their language or their lore. He laughs at their beliefs and calls 
them silly, exactly as the missionary frowns over them and calls 
them wicked. His interests are in fur and in whalebone, as the 
missionary's are in the teaching of doctrine and the enforcement of 
Sabbath observance, and the habits of the foxes are of greater interest 
to him than the habits of the people. 

Wlien Christianity came to Rome, the temples of the gods became 
the churches of God, but there was still the atmosphere of the temple 
about them. The feasts of the heathen became the feasts of the 
church. Yule became Christmas, and in German countries the 
gods Thor and Odin became devils, snarers of souls, and the enemies 
of the Kingdom. Just so among the Eskimo the missionary becomes 
in the minds of the people a shaman. His prohibitions become 
taboos ; and as miracles could be wrought under the old system by 
formulae and charms, so the Christian religion among them becomes 
not one of "works," but of ritual, and prayers are expected to have 
their immediate and material effect as the charms did formerly. 

To illustrate one of the phases of the native religion of the Eskimo, 
we may consider the question of food taboos. In the mountains 
of Alaska, on the upper Kuvuk and Noatak rivers, and on the head- 
waters of the Colville, the prohibitions which applied to the eating 
of the flesh of the mountain sheep alone were as extensive as the 
entire dietary section of the Mosaic law. A young girl, for instance, 
might eat only certain ribs, and when she was a little older she might 
eat certain other ribs ; but when she was full grown she would for a 
time have to abstain from eating the ribs which had been allowed to 
her up to then. After a woman had had her first child, she might 
eat certain other ribs, after her second child still others, and only 
after having five children might she eat all the ribs ; but even then 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 411 

she must not eat the membranes on the inside of the ribs. If her 
child was sick, she must not eat certain ribs, and if two of her children 
were sick, she might not eat certain other ribs. If her brother's 
child was sick, she might not eat certain portions, and if her brother's 
wife died, there were still different prohibitions. The taboos applying 
to the ribs of the sheep had relation to the health of her children 
and of her relatives. They also depended upon what animals her 
relatives or herself had killed recently, and on whether those animals 
were male or female. 

When all the compulsory taboos were remembered and complied 
with, there were still some optional ones. If she wanted her daughter 
to be a good seamstress, she would observe certain taboos with regard 
to the mountain sheep, and if her son was to be a good hunter, there 
was a different set of rules to be followed ; when her son had killed 
his first game, there was still another variation, and so on. When 
people of different districts met at a meal, some one, perhaps the 
hostess, would recite all the taboos which she knew which were appro- 
priate to that meal, and then would ask one of her guests whether he 
knew any in addition. He would then contribute such as his hostess 
had omitted ; then a second guest would be appealed to, and when all 
the taboos which all those present knew of had been clearly called 
to mind, the meal would go on. Then the next day, if one of them had 
a headache, or if the cousin of another broke a leg, they would say 
to one another, "What taboo could it have been that we broke?" 
Some wise old man's advice would be called upon, and he would be 
told of all the taboos which were observed, and then he would say, 
"How did you break your marrow-bone ?" Some one would volun- 
teer, "I broke mine with a stone." "Yes, and which hand did you 
hold the stone in when you broke it?" "My right hand." "Ah 
yes, that explains it; you should have held the stone in your left 
hand. That is why your cousin's leg got broken. You broke the 
marrow-bone the wrong way." 

It may be a little difficult for the average white man to enter 
into the frame of mind of those who live under such a complicated 
taboo system, but it is also difficult for us to sympathize with some 
of the beliefs held by our immediate ancestors ; and if it is a little 
difficult for us to understand the frame of mind of these people, may 



412 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

it not be a little difficult for them to understand ours ? Is it not 
likely that an elaborate and ingrained system such as this will affect 
their conception of our rather abstract teachings ? A people brought 
up in the thought habits of a taboo system such as this are likely 
to continue thinking in the terms of that system after they have 
been baptized. They will fit the instruction of their teachers, be 
they schoolmasters or missionaries, into the molds of their ancestral 
lore. 

Among the Eskimo the expression, "a wise man," being trans- 
lated, means "a man who knows a large number of taboos." He 
is an honored member of the community always who knows more than 
any one else about the things that ought not to be done. To know 
these things is very important, for if they be done — if a taboo be 
broken — no matter how innocently and unknowingly, the inevitable 
penalty follows in the form of an epidemic or a famine or an accident 
or illness affecting some relative of the breaker of the taboo. 

An Eskimo who is a great admirer of the white people (and some 
Eskimo are not) said to me once that some Eskimo foolishly main- 
tained that white men were less intelligent than Eskimo are. But 
he said that he had a crushing reply to those who made this statement. 
He would say to them : " Our wise men have taboos on food and drink, 
they have taboos on clothing and methods of travel, on words and 
thoughts ; but until the white man came, did we ever hear of Sunday ? 
Did the wisest of us ever think of the fact that a day might be taboo ? " 

A shaman among the Eskimos is in his own person no wiser than 
you or I. In every-day life he is quite as likely to do foolish things, 
quite as liable to be wrong ; but when he goes into a trance his own 
spirit is superseded by the familiar spirit which enters his body, and 
it is the familiar spirit which talks through the mouth of the shaman. 
It is only then that his words become wisdom, on which you may rely 
unthinkingly. When in a trance the shaman is the mouth-piece of 
a spirit, and at any time, by the use of the formulae by which the 
spirits are controlled, he can get them to do his bidding, be it good 
or ill. For that reason the shaman is deferred to, irrespective of 
whether you like him personally or not, and without regard to what 
you may think of his character and natural abilities, except that 
the more you fear he may be disposed to evil actions, the more care- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 413 

ful you are not to give him offense, and to comply with everything 
he commands or intimates, for (being evilly disposed) he may punish 
you harshly if you incur his displeasure. 

Just as in Rome the priests of the new religion took the place of 
the priests of the old, so among the Eskimo the missionary under the 
new dispensation takes the place of the ancient shaman of the old 
regime. When he speaks as a missionary, he speaks as the mouth- 
piece of God, exactly as the shaman was the mouth-piece of the spirits. 
The commands he issues at that time are the commands of God, 
as the commands of the shaman were not his own but those of the 
spirit which possessed him. And as in the old days the evilly dis- 
posed shamans were the most feared, similarly that one of all the 
missionaries known to me who is personally the most unpopular 
among his Eskimo congregation is also the one whose word is the most 
absolute law and whom none would cross under any circumstances. 
"For," think the Eskimo, "being a bad man, he may pray to God 
to make us sick or do us some harm." 

Our main purpose here is not to elucidate or to present conclu- 
sions, but rather to present facts which happen to be chiefly in the 
form of anecdotes; but the foregoing has seemed necessary to give 
the reader a point of view from which the evidence can be interpreted. 
To see the bearing of the facts clearly we must keep sight of the two 
things of main importance : namely, first, that the ideas which the 
Eskimo has of the new religion are dictated by his environment and 
colored by the habits of thought developed under the old religion ; 
and, second (and most important), that he looks upon the missionary 
as the mouth-piece of God, exactly as the shaman was the mouth- 
piece of the spirits ; bearing these things in mind, we shall glance at 
the history of the spread of Christianity in Alaska. 

Most of the abstract and strange ideas of which the Eskimo 
of even the civilized north coast of Alaska have knowledge have been 
presented to them first by missionaries, who generally precede the 
school-teacher into distant fields, yet we shall draw our first case for 
consideration from an Alaskan public school. The winter of 1908, 
and for a year before that and a year after, the government school- 
teacher at Point Barrow was Mr. Charles W. Hawkesworth. Mr. 
Hawkesworth was a New Englander, a graduate of Bowdoin, a 



414 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

fine type of man of the sort that is rare even in New England and yet 
typical of New England. He said, and I agreed with him, that he 
thought the Eskimo boys and girls at Barrow had as much native 
intelligence as boys and girls of a similar age and the same grade in 
school in Massachusetts or New Hampshire. But I told him that, 
admitting all that, I did not believe they were getting from the 
books which they read and the lectures which he delivered to them the 
same ideas that pupils in a Massachusetts school would get, for their 
environment was so essentially different from that described in the 
books that many a thing which is a plain statement to a boy in 
Massachusetts must be to the boy of northern Alaska a riddle 
without a key. Apparently Mr, Hawkesworth did not fully agree 
with me in this, but an examination in United States history which 
he held shortly after gave results which bore out my contention 
fairly well. He had been lecturing for several weeks on the causes 
of the war with England, and his pupils had in connection with these 
lectures read the ordinary assigned reading required of pupils of the 
eighth and ninth grades. Among other things, they had heard much 
of the "Boston Tea Party" and of the events that preceded and 
followed. One of the questions in tlie examination was, "Why did 
the American colonists go to war with England?" and one of the 
brightest Eskimo boys wrote the following answer : " It was no 
wonder that the Americans got angry at the English, for the English 
were so mean they put tacks in the tea they sold the Americans." 
The point is obvious. Had the lectures and reading been on the 
Pure Food and Drugs Act, every pupil in the Barrow school would 
have understood, because the adulteration of food by traders is to 
them a familiar thing ; but taxation, with or without representation, 
was a foreign idea and essentially incomprehensible. And if taxation 
is incomprehensible when presented by a schoolmaster, our abstract 
religious concepts are no less so when expounded by a missionary. 
The Christianity which exists in the minds of the missionaries 
being as essentially incomprehensible to the Eskimo as our abstract 
political and scientific ideas and complex social organization, the 
missionaries at first naturally accomplished little. At the mouth 
of the Mackenzie River, for instance, when I was there first in the 
winter of 1906-07, the missionaries of the Church of England had been 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 415 

already for more than a decade without making a convert. The 
people were still unconverted in September, 1907, when I left the 
district. When I returned in June, 1908, they had been Christianized 
to the last man. 

I am not sure where Christianity started in Arctic Alaska, but I 
believe it to have been in Kotzebue Sound. So soon as the people 
here were converted, there grew up among them what might be called 
an Eskimoized Christianity, in other words, Christianity compre- 
hensible to the Esldmo. The real Christianity had had great diffi- 
culty in taking root, but this new form spread like the measles. It 
went northwest along the coast to Point Hope, and northeast across 
the mountains to the Colville River, so that when I reached the Col- 
ville in October, 1908, every man there had become a Christian, 
although they had had no direct dealings with white missionaries. 

* I was considerably astonished (in October, 1908), on entering 
the first Eskimo house at the mouth of the Itkillik, a branch of the 
Colville, to have set before me a wash-dish and towel, and to have 
my host recite a lengthy prayer over the wash-dish, in order, as he 
said, to make the water suitable for my use. According to my 
custom, I declined the use of the basin and towel, even after they had 
been consecrated, telling my host that a boiled towel would have 
been much more attractive to me than a consecrated one ; for here, 
as everywhere else among the civilized Eskimo, one must be on his 
guard against the contagious skin and eye diseases of civilization 
that spread in no way faster than by the use of common towels. 

After my Eskimo companions had washed (from ancestral custom 
they were inclined to accept every new taboo as a matter of course), 
another prayer was recited over the basin and towel, and then a 
lengthy grace was said over the food before we commenced eating, 
as well as a separate one over the teacups, which were brought in 
at the end of the meal. Finally, thanks were offered at the close. 
I asked my host from v^^hence he got these prayers and these new 
ideas, and he said that they came over the mountains from Kotzebue 
Sound, brought by a man well versed in the new religion and the 
possessor of a great many efficient prayers. The best prayer of all 

* Note : Various incidents in this chapter were previously related in a 
different context in Chapter VI. 



416 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

which this man had brought, and the most useful, our host told us, 
was one for caribou. The Colville people had used it the first year 
with such success that they had killed as many caribou as they had 
any need for. This was three years ago, and last year the prayer had 
not worked so well, while this year it had seemed to be of no use at 
all. The hunting had been very poor indeed. By the gradually 
decreasing efficiency of this prayer our host had been led to suppose 
that prayers, like white men's rifles and other things which they 
bring, had their full efficiency only while new, and no doubt gradually 
wore out and finally became useless. (This, by the way, can scarcely 
be said to be in the terms of the old religion, for it was believed that 
the older a charm was the greater its power. They had apparently 
transferred their experience with the white man's shoddy trade 
goods to the realm of his religion.) Now that this prayer, after 
three years' use, had lost its power over game, our host inquired 
anxiously if we did not know a good one from the Mackenzie River 
missionary, of the general efficiency of whose prayers the Colville 
people had heard much. I knew no such prayer, and neither did 
Natkusiak, but Akpek announced he had a fairly good one. When 
this fact became known, the village lost interest in the two of us in 
large measure, and concentrated it on Akpek, who was feted and 
invited about from house to house, always followed by a crowd of 
people eager to learn from him the new prayer to have it ready for 
the caribou hunting in the spring. 

We settled down to live with these Colville people, and commenced 
making preparations for the winter. The only thing to do was to 
catch fish. Now it seems that in Kotzebue Sound, where the Chris- 
tian doctrines of the Colville people had originated, fishing is by nets 
only. As fishing is no doubt practically the only work done there, 
or was so before the development of mining, the missionary had 
probably said to them, " Do not put out your fish-nets on Sunday/' 
meaning thereby, "Do not work on Sunday" — there being no other 
work. However that may be, the prohibition came to our community 
in the form : " God has said you must not use fish-nets on Sunday." 
Accordingly the entire community pulled their fish-nets out of the 
river Saturday night, fished with hooks all day Sunday, and put the 
nets back into the water Monday morning. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 417 

The winter of 1908-09, while I was staying at the village of Cape 
Smythe, there arrived one Saturday about noon a man and his 
wife with a well-fed team of dogs and sled-load consisting partly 
of fresh caribou skins and caribou sinew, which latter has a high 
value on the north coast of Alaska as sewing-thread. Although 
this couple did not actually appear at the whaling station where I 
was staying, I learned about their coming immediately, for the news 
spread like wild-fire through the village that people had come who 
had caribou sldns to sell. The couple said that they had spent the 
fall on the upper Colville River, had made a successful caribou hunt 
there, had stayed until all the meat was eaten up except what they 
could haul with them on their sled, and had then set out across 
country, heading northwest for Cape Smythe. This was the sub- 
stance of what they told about their journeyings, until toward mid- 
night, when they added the further detail that the man's sister 
and her husband had been with them on the upper Colville, that 
they had not succeeded so well in the caribou hunt, and that when 
they started, each family with its own sled, from the Colville, the 
sled of this second couple had been empty of meat. The family who 
had plenty had with great generosity fed the family which had 
none, but had refused to give any meat to their dogs, with the result 
that the poor animals became nothing but skin and bones. Then 
a severe blizzard struck them, and all the hungry dogs froze to death, 
while of course nothing happened to the well-fed dog team. When 
the one couple had no dogs with which to haul their sled, the other 
could no longer wait for them and had abandoned them about forty 
miles southeast from Cape Smythe. 

The people who had been abandoned had some relatives in the 
Cape Smythe village, and even apart from them there were many 
who were ready to go to the rescue. The relief party was about to 
set out when some one pointed out that Saturday was just merging 
into Sunday and that no work must be done on the Sabbath. 

Strangely enough, none of the white men at Cape Smythe heard 
anything of the abandoned couple, although we learned later that 
their case had been a topic of continuous conversation all day Sunday. 
The first any white man knew of it was after Dr. Marsh had con- 
ducted the regular evening services in the church, when he found, very 
2e 



418 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

much to his surprise, that the people after the service did not leave 
the church as usual and go to their homes. When he asked them why 
this was, they replied that they were waiting for Sunday to be over 
so that they could start out to the rescue of a starving couple that had 
been abandoned inland. When Dr. Marsh knew about the case he 
of course did all he could to hurry things up, but it was already 
midnight when the searchers got started. The weather had been 
fine on Saturday, and there would that day have been no trouble 
in following the trail of the couple who had arrived, but by Sunday 
night the wind had been blowing and the drifting snow had covered 
up the trail. The search party was out two days, but returned to 
Cape Smythe without finding any one. 

A day or two after this, Thomas Gordon, who was living about 
three miles northeast of Cape Smythe, heard a faint noise outside 
his front door. He thought nothing of it at first, but a little later 
some one accidentally went out and found an Eskimo who had col- 
lapsed and fainted on the front-door step. When this man had been 
revived in the warmth of the house, it turned out that he was the 
man of the couple abandoned. Mr. Gordon sent a sled on the 
man's trail, and they soon found his wife encamped in a fireless hut, 
with her hands and feet slightly but not seriously frozen. Half a 
dozen hours later she would no doubt have been maimed for life. 

While I was in the Cape Smythe village, I never saw the man who 
had abandoned his sister and her husband to starve and freeze, but 
it happened a month or two later that my party was storm-bound 
on the southeast corner of Smith Bay, at the house of an old ac- 
quaintance of ours named Kunagrak, who was related to all the 
people concerned. The man who had done the abandoning happened 
to be staying with Kunagrak. I noticed that when we sat down 
to meals it was he who said grace ; in spiritual matters he seemed to 
be an authority and the leading light of the place. As a matter of 
curiosity I asked him if he had been long a Christian, and he replied, 
"About ten years." He further volunteered the information that 
during all that time he had never eaten a meal without saying grace, 
and had never worked on Sunday, and had kept all the command- 
ments of the Lord. I asked him if he had never heard that to aban- 
don people to starve was against the commandments of the Lord. He 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 419 

had never heard that particular commandment, he said ; but that 
might be because his Christianity had come entirely from some Kot- 
zebue Sound Eskimo. He had never had the advantage of the 
direct instruction of a white missionary, and no doubt he might not 
have heard all the commandments of which those might have knowl- 
edge who had been better instructed than he. Just as a man who 
sits down to a meal of mountain sheep will adopt quickly a food 
taboo of which he is informed by any one who happens to be pres- 
ent, so this man seemed glad to learn that abandoning people 
to starve was against the desire of the Lord, and he would make a 
point of seeing that it did not happen again. 

Many of my ideas as to the form which Christianity takes in 
the minds of the Eskimo I naturally get from the Eskimo with 
whom we most associated, the civilized Alaskans whom we employed 
to accompany us on our journeys of exploration. One of them, 
Ilavinirk, was a native of Kotzebue Sound, and had for over twenty 
years been fairly continuously in the service of white men, although, 
like the rest of the natives of Herschel Island, he had not been an 
avowed Christian more than four years. 

^ During the summer of 1909, when we were traveling by boat east 
along the coast from Flaxman Island, there was in our party, but 
sailing his own boat, an Eskimo by the name of Oniyak. His old 
and decrepit father was also of the party, and it seemed to me that 
I had seldom seen an old man so badly treated, for every evening he 
was compelled to make his own camp separate from that of his 
son and family, although there was plenty of room for him in his 
son's tent. He was not allowed to take his meals with the rest of 
them, but was given a sort of "hand out." He was continually 
short of tobacco and matches, although his son was a trader and had 
more of both than he needed for his own use. The old man used 
to beg various things from us, which we of course gave him gladly. 
I did not understand at the time why he should have been so 
treated, and thought of it only as an unusual example of unfilial 
conduct. In general I have seen old people among the Eskimos 
remarkably well treated. 

It was only one day at Langton Bay, two years later, that Ilavinirk 
asked me if I knew why it was that Oniyak treated his father in this 



420 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

way, and when I said I did not know why, he explained that it was 
because the son had just been converted to Christianity, and the 
missionary had told the converts not to associate with unbelievers. 
The old man and one old woman in the tribe were the only two who 
did not accept Christianity. The old man's son, Ilavinirk said, 
was in a great quandary, because he was fond of his father but did 
not dare to disobey the missionary's injunctions. He had found a 
sort of middle course, therefore, by compelling the old man to keep 
his own house and to eat by himself. 

Continuing on this subject, Ilavinirk said that the old woman who 
would not accept Christianity was the most perverse old body he 
ever heard tell of. All arguments had failed to convince her of the 
truths of Christianity, and she kept saying that she had seen the 
spirits of her own belief cure disease, avert famine, and bring a change 
of wind, and she had yet to see that the new religion could do any 
better. It was of no avail to explain to her that the new religion 
did not claim to do any better in these things, but differed from the 
old in promising eternal blessedness to those who lived righteously, 
and threatened eternal punishment to those who did not. The old 
woman kept saying she would wait and see. She would not be- 
lieve in either heaven or hell until she saw them. 

Ilavinirk said that the old w^oman's son was greatly worried by 
this attitude of mind of his mother, and whenever he got new argu- 
ments and new facts from the missionary or from the converted 
Eskimo he would always present them to his mother with the hope 
of getting her to experience a change of heart. One day a missionary 
had preached to them in this way : If any of you believe that fire 
will not burn you if you stick your hand into it, then you may believe 
also that the things I tell you are not true ; but if you believe that 
fire would burn you, then you must believe also that what I say is 
true. (Naturally, no missionary ever said any such thing. What he 
really said can only be guessed at. Extreme misunderstandings are, of 
course, common, due partly to the missionary's imperfect command 
of Eskimo, and partly to the fact that his ideas are essentially strange 
to them.) When her son presented this argument, Ilavinirk said 
that such was the old woman's perversity that she only laughed 
and ridiculed it, saying that she did not see an}i:hing convincing 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 421 

about that sort of reasoning. Hoping nevertheless to convince 
her by an actual test, her son waited until she was asleep, when he 
lit a match and held it under her hand, letting the flame play over 
her fingers. The old woman awoke screaming with paiti. But so 
perverse was she that even this did not convince her, and so far as 
Ilavinirk knew she was still a heathen. Some people are that way, 
Ilavinirk philosophized. He supposed, however, that if the fire 
of a match was not hot enough to make unbelievers change their 
minds, perhaps the fires of hell would be more convincing. 

I heard from Ilavinirk a good deal about the religious views of 
the Baillie Islands Eskimo, but knew little of them otherwise, for it 
has happened that I have never associated much with that particular 
group. The summer of 1911 I sent Ilavinirk and Natkusiak to the 
Baillie Islands with a boat, and they remained there for several weeks. 
At that time Ilavinirk told me there came from the Mackenzie River 
the report that God had said that you must not look at the sun. 
It is difficult to guess what the foundation of this story may have been. 
It is conceivable it may have been based on the story of how the 
Israelites fell away from the true religion and worshiped false gods, 
and how some people have looked upon the sun as a god. Possibly 
the missionary may have meant to tell his hearers that they must 
not look upon the sun, powerful and brilliant though it is, as a deity. 
But what the}^ understood was that they must not glance at it. 
This commandment struck Ilavinirk as a little unreasonable, and he 
said that he had argued with the Baillie Islanders to the effect that 
no doubt God did not mean that they should be prohibited from 
glancing at the sun, but only that they must refrain from staring 
intently at it. 

As an introduction to the narrative that follows it is necessary 
to point out that among the Eskimo, as among many other primitive 
people, notably in North America, a person who is under some sort of 
taboo must not follow in the trail made by other people, and if he 
makes a trail, then others must not follow it. 

Apparently some missionary in Alaska, or itmay possibly have been 
at Mackenzie River, had preached from the text : " Do not follow in the 
footsteps of the wicked." What some of the Eskimo thought of me, no 
less than how they understood the text upon which the missionary had 



422 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

preached, can be seen from the fact that one day I noticed that some 
Eskimo who were travehng behind me were not following in my trail. 

Some of the things concerning which the Eskimo have received 
new ideas from the missionaries are of a somewhat fundamental 
nature; other things which Ilavinirk believed the missionaries to 
have taught his people are rather immaterial and make little difference 
one way or the other. He told me one day that he had often won- 
dered why it was that the mammoth are all extinct. He knew now, 
however, for Mr. Whittaker, the missionary at Herschel Island, 
had explained to them how it was. After God created the earth 
and made the people and the animals in it, the people gradually 
became wickeder and wickeder, until God made up His mind to 
destroy them all by drowning. But one man called Noah was an 
excellent man. God went to him one day and told him to build 
a ship, and to take into it all his family, and to invite all the animals 
of the earth to enter the ship also. Noah did as he was directed and 
invited the animals to enter, and they all entered except the mammoth. 
When Noah asked the mammoth why they had not come into the ship 
also, they said they did not think there would be much of a flood ; 
and anyway, if there were something of a flood, they thought their legs 
were long enough to keep their heads above water. So God became 
angry with the mammoth ; and although the other animals were saved. 
He drowned all the mammoth. That is why the caribou and the 
wolves and foxes are still alive, and why the mammoth are all dead. 

With reference to this story and others, I used to argue with our 
Eskimo, telling them that they must have misunderstood the mis- 
sionary, and that he could not have said any such thing; but my 
arguing was without avail. While they considered that I was fairly 
reliable in every-day affairs, they had my own word for it that in 
spiritual matters I had no special knowledge. And anyway, they 
said, in the old days one man knew taboos and doctrines which 
another did not know, even though both were shamans, and so they 
thought it was perfectly possible that Mr. Whittaker might know 
things about God and His works of which I had never heard. Then, 
too, they said, "He tells us these things when he is preaching" 
(which being interpreted means that when he was preaching, Mr. 
Whittaker was the spokesman of God in the same sense that the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 423 

shamans had been the spokesmen of the spirits under the old sys- 
tem. In other words, when they hsten to a missionary preaching 
they hear the voice of Jehovah speaking through the mouth of a man) . 

I had many talks with Ilavinirk on religion, for he was communi- 
cative, and his mental processes, typical as they are of those of his 
people, were of the greatest interest to me. It was Dr. Anderson, 
however, who told me the following : It was when he and Ilavinirk 
and some other Eskimo in February, 1912, were hunting caribou 
east of Langton Bay. They had been sitting in the house for some 
time, and no one had been talking, when Ilavinirk all of a sudden 
remarked to Dr. Anderson that it was a pity they had killed Christ 
so young. Dr. Anderson made some non-committal answer, and 
Ilavinirk continued : " Yes, it is a great pity ; for the missionary 
has told us Christ came to all the people of the earth, and He never 
came to the Eskimo. I suppose that must have been because 
He visited the other countries first, and had not yet found time 
to visit the Eskimo before He was killed." This shows pretty 
clearly what Ilavinirk's idea was of Christ's having come as a mes- 
senger not only to the Jews, but to the Gentiles also. 

Another of our Eskimo, Tannaumirk, was considered by his 
countrymen, the Mackenzie River people, as exceptionally well 
versed in the truths of the new religion. He was, on the whole, a 
very sensible boy and a bit philosophical, although not very resource- 
ful or self-reliant in every-day affairs. He liked to have long talks 
on the whys and wherefores of things. It was during the convales- 
cence of Dr. Anderson from pneumonia at Cape Parry that Tannau- 
mirk and I one day were discussing the religion of his people and 
mine. "Is it true," he asked me, "that Christ was the only white 
man who could raise people from the dead?" "Yes," I told him, 
" He was the only one ; and some of my countrymen doubt that even 
He could." Said Tannaumirk: "I can understand how that 
might easily be so with your countrymen. If Christ was the only 
white man who could do it, and if you never knew of any one else 
who could, I can see why you should doubt His being able to do it. 
You naturally would not understand how it was done. But we 
Eskimo do not doubt it, because we understand it. We ourselves 
can raise people from the dead. You know that some years before 



424 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

you first came to the Mackenzie district Taiakpanna died. He 
died in the morning, and Alualuk, the great shaman, arrived in the 
afternoon. The body of Taiakpanna was still lying there in the 
house ; Alualuk immediately summoned his familiar spirits, performed 
the appropriate ceremonies, and woke Taiakpanna from the dead, 
and, as you know, he is still living. If Alualuk could do it, why 
should we doubt that Christ could do it, too ?" 

This Alualuk referred to by Tannaumirk is a Point Barrow Eskimo 
living among the Mackenzie people. I have known him for many 
years, and I also knew Taiakpanna during the winter of 1906-07. 
He was then an old man, possibly sixty years of age. The spring of 
1912, on my way from Langton Bay to Point Barrow, I visited 
Alualuk's house and stayed there overnight. Among other things, 
he told me, about as Tannaumirk had related it, the story of how he 
had waked Taiakpanna from the dead a few years ago, and con- 
tinued, with evident regret, to the effect that now Taiakpanna had 
died again last year, and that he had this time been unable to wake 
him from the dead because he (Alualuk) had now renounced his 
familiar spirits and had become a Christian. I asked him whether 
he could not possibly have summoned back his familiar spirits and 
awakened Taiakpanna. He said that possibly he might have; he 
did not know. The spirits had been rather badly offended by his 
having renounced them in favor of Christianity, and while they 
might have been willing to return to him again had he summoned 
them, it was more likely they would not have responded. But any- 
way, he was a Christian now, and he knew it was wicked to employ 
familiar spirits. For that reason he would not have been willing to 
undertake to revive Taiakpanna even had he been able. After all, he 
pointed out to me, Taiakpanna was an old man, and it was time for 
him to die. He had been converted and had died in the true faith, 
and no doubt his soul had been saved and was now dwelling in everlast- 
ing bhss ; and why should he interfere to confer a doubtful benefit on 
Taiakpanna, especially when it was at the risk of his own salvation ? 

This statement of Alualuk's puts fairly clearly the attitude of his 
people toward things of the old religion. When the Norsemen ac- 
cepted Jehovah they did not cease to believe in Thor and Odin, but 
they renounced them in favor of the higher new God and the preferred 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 425 

new religion. Thor and Odin continued to exist, becoming in the 
minds of the people the enemies of the new faith and of all who pro- 
fessed it. Just so the Eskimo still believe in all the spirits of the 
old faith and in all its other facts, and they believe all the Christian 
teachings on top of that. They have not ceased to have faith in the 
heathen things, but they have ceased to practice them because they 
are wicked and lessen one's chances of salvation. The familiar 
spirits have been renounced, but they still exist, and are in general 
inimical to the new faith and angry with their former patrons who 
have renounced them. 

Our first experience with the Sunday taboo was at Shingle Point, 
about fifty miles east of Herschel Island, in July, 1908. Dr. Ander- 
son and I, with our Eskimo and two whale-boats, had arrived there 
at the boat harbor one evening. Each Eskimo family had its own 
whale-boat, and we were all bound for Herschel Island and anxious 
to reach it, because we feared that any day the whaling fleet might 
arrive from the west, put into the Herschel Island harbor for a day, 
according to their custom, and pass on to the east, and all of us were 
anxious to be there to meet the ships. 

The morning after we reached Shingle Point and for several days 
after that it blew a steady head-wind, and we were unable to pro- 
ceed. We were getting more impatient each day and more worried, 
for the wind that was foul to us was fair to the whaling-ships, and 
would bring them in and take them past without our seeing them, 
we feared. Wlien our impatience to be moving had grown to a high 
pitch, we awoke on a Sunday morning early, to find a change of wind. 
It blew off the land, and the weather was therefore propitious for 
travel. Some of our Eskimo neighbors paid us an early morning 
visit, and inquired whether we were going to start for Herschel Island 
that day. My answer was that of course we were, at which they 
were evidently well pleased ; and when we had eaten breakfast a 
good many of them had struck their tents and were loading the camp- 
gear into the boats. After our breakfast was over I said to our 
Eskimo that now we would start, but they replied that they could 
not do so unless some one started off first, in which case we could 
follow. Considerably astonished, I asked them why that should be 
so. They replied it was Sunday, and a person who led off in Sab- 



426 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

bath-breaking would receive punishment. Accordingly, they said, 
if any one was found who was willing to start, they were willing to 
follow ; but they would not lead off, for then the sin would be on their 
heads, and they or their relatives would be punished. 

As many of the Eskimo boats were already loaded, I at first 
thought it would be a question of but a few moments until some one 
would start, for these people had all been heathen when I had lived 
with them the previous autumn, and I could not at once grasp the fact 
of the new sacredness of the Sabbath, which had been a neglected 
institution half a year before. But it turned out that of all our im- 
patient party no one dared to start. I went around among them 
from boat to boat, inquiring whether they were not going to launch 
out. The answer of each boat crew was that they would not start 
out first, but they would follow me if I started. 

After talking over with Dr. Anderson the necessity of doing 
something, I suggested to our own Eskimo servants that Dr. Anderson 
and I alone would sail one of our whale-boats and lead off, and they 
could follow in their boat ; to which they replied that a subterfuge 
of that sort would avail nothing, for they belonged to my party now, 
and would (so long as they were of my party) have to suffer the 
penalty of any wrongdoing of mine. If I insisted upon sailing that 
day, they would have to sever their connection with us in order to 
escape the penalty of our desecration of the Sabbath. So we accord- 
ingly had the choice of losing the services of our Eskimo, which for 
the future were indispensable to us, or of letting the fair wind blow 
itself out unused, which we did. 

I spoke to Ilavinirk about the fact that he and I, less than a year 
before, had traveled together on Sunday, to which he replied that at 
that time he was not a Christian, and although he had heard of heaven 
and hell, he had not then realized the situation or the importance of 
good conduct ; but that now he realized both fully, as did all his 
countrymen, and not only did he not care to brave the Divine punish- 
ment, but also he was unwilling to become an object of the disappro- 
bation of his countrymen. (I believe that in fact the latter reason 
was with Ilavinirk quite as strong as the former, for on other occa- 
sions when none of his countrymen were around he often followed 
my lead in breaking the Sabbath.) 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 427 

The good wind blew all day, and there we stayed, all of us eager 
to reach Herschel Island, and each of us unwilling to be the first to 
break the divine law. Toward sundown the situation was changed 
by the arrival from the east of a whale-boat manned by Royal North- 
west Mounted Police, a party of whom were on their way from Fort 
McPherson to Herschel Island. We signaled them to come ashore, 
and they had tea with us. Afterward, when they set sail, all of us 
followed them, for by landing and taking tea with us they had joined 
themselves to our party, and it was therefore they and not we who 
broke the Sabbath when they started off, with our boats close behind. 
By the time we finally got off the fair wind had nearly spent itself, 
and most of us had a good deal of trouble in getting to Herschel 
Island by beating and rowing, which is a detail. 

The foundation of the next story we have to tell is no doubt a 
discussion by some missionary of a text the substance of which is 
that everything on earth, and all that men have, is from God. This 
the Eskimo have understood in a manner to make Christ practically 
the equivalent of the ancient culture hero. Just as Hiawatha gave 
mankind the Indian corn and taught us how to cultivate it, so Christ 
has given the white men everything they have and taught them 
everything they know. Consequently it is not such a wonderful 
thing, nor indeed one with which we ought to credit ourselves par- 
ticularly, that we possess marvelous inventions and much knowledge. 
It is Hiawatha and not the ordinary Indian who deserves the credit 
for introducing the art of corn-growing ; and so it is Christ and not 
any ordinary human being who deserves the credit for having taught 
white men how to raise wheat and grind it into flour. "All our 
knowledge is from God" they understand to mean that Christ, who 
represented God on earth, personally instructed us in all arts and 
crafts. Gunpowder and field-glasses are wonderful in their way, 
but the Eskimo does not see why he should be considered behind the 
white man just because Christ taught the white men how to make 
these things. He did not happen to teach it to the Eskimo, which 
is the misfortune of the Eskimo and not their fault. 

In the winter of 1911-12 I met with a striking example of this 
belief among the members of my own party. There is in use among 
the Mackenzie River Esldmo for writing purposes an alphabet intro- 



428 MY_LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

duced among them by Rev. C. E. Whittaker, the missionary of the 
Church of England at Fort McPherson. This alphabet being 
based on English and being introduced by Mr. Whittaker before he 
had as yet acquired the same command of the language which he 
now has, is not very phonetic, and for my own use I had devised an 
alphabet on more strictly phonetic principles, where the ideal is 
that each letter shall represent but one sound, and that there shall be 
a separate letter for every sound. My own Eskimo, who knew 
Mr. Whittaker's system of writing, soon picked up mine and grew 
to prefer it. They were very enthusiastic about the new system, 
and commenced teaching it to their neighbors, for one of the most 
remarkable things about the Eskimo is their passion for such rudi- 
ments of learning as they have been able to lay their hands on. 

One day there arose in our house a discussion of the various arts 
and inventions possessed by the white men, and the Eskimo, in a 
moralizing way, said that we had to be thankful to Christ not only 
for the spiritual blessings which He had bestowed upon mankind 
and the hope of salvation He had given them, but also for teaching 
them useful things, and especially for teaching them to read and 
write, for they considered reading and writing to be the foundation 
of all knowledge and of all the advancement of the white men. With 
reference to this, I said that they had evidently misunderstood the 
missionary. The missionary had no intention of telling them that 
Christ had taught us how to read and write. "Well," they asked 
me, "if Christ did not teach you, how did you first learn it?" I 
had to reply that I did not know how we first learned, but I did know 
that it occurred longer ago than the date assigned as that on which 
Christ lived on earth, and explained to them the fact that many 
books of the Bible much antedated the coming of Christ. That was 
as it might be, about the antiquity of the books of the Bible, they 
said in reply, but one thing they did know was that Mr. Whittaker 
had told them that Christ taught mankind to read and write, and as 
for them, they believed it. They did not know what I thought of 
Mr. Whittaker, but they believed that he was a truthful man. I 
told them that my regard for the veracity of Mr. Whittaker was 
quite as high as theirs, but I felt sure that they had misunderstood 
him, and then, in a joking way, I said to them that whoever it might 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 429 

have been who originated the alphabet which Mr. Whittaker gave 
them, it was I myself who had originated the alphabet which they 
were now using. No doubt, they replied, I knew whereof I spoke 
with reference to my alphabet ; but so did Mr. Whittaker know 
with reference to his alphabet ; Mr. Whittaker had told them that 
Christ had made it, and that being so, they were hereafter going to 
use Christ's alphabet and not mine. From that time on they ceased 
writing letters to their friends in my alphabet or in any way using 
it, going back entirely to Mr. Whittaker's alphabet. 

Those who do not know any situation analogous to the one we are 
describing are likely to say that any such notions as those indicated 
by these scattered anecdotes can be easily eradicated by a missionary 
who understands the situation and sets himself to the work, but this 
is not so. [Fundamentally, the Eskimo consider themselves better 
men than we are. In the matter of Christianity they concede that 
we introduced it, but they do not concede that we know more about 
it tha'n they do ; just as many Christians concede that Christianity 
spread from Rome, but do not concede that Rome is nowadays the 
highest authority in religious matters. 

A striking way in which this shows itself is in the belief in special 
revelations which come directly to the Eskimo, and the belief in the 
rebirth of the Saviour among them. Both in Alaska and in Green- 
land there have been, since the coming of Christianity, many cases of 
Immaculate Conception and the birth of heralded saviors of the 
race. In some cases the thing has been nipped in the bud through 
the fact that the child born happened to be a female, which was not 
according to the predictions. A sufficient number of these cases 
are on record in books, and instead of retelling them I shall therefore 
merely refer to the interesting accounts of Knud Rasmussen from 
Greenland, which can be secured in any bookshop or library. 

There are also in every community Eskimo who are in the habit 
of visiting heaven and conferring there with Christ Himself, with 
Saint Peter and others, quite in the manner in which they used to 
visit the moon while still heathen and have discussions with the man 
in the moon. The man in the moon used to teach the shamans 
songs and spells, and now St. Peter teaches the deacons of the Eskimo 
church hymns and chants (which are, curiously enough, generally 



430 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

in the jargon language which the whalers use in dealing with the 
Eskimo). 

There are also frequent and weighty revelations in the matter of 
doctrine. If the missionary should learn of any of these things and 
should disagree with them (but he is not likely to learn, for the 
Eskimo have found out that the missionaries do not approve of 
present-day revelation, and therefore keep it secret as much as pos- 
sible), they might be respectful and polite about it to his face, as they 
always are, but among themselves they would say that while they 
had no doubt that the Lord spoke unto Moses, neither did they 
doubt that he also spoke unto this and that countryman of theirs; 
and if what God said to the Hebrews seems to disagree with what 
He has said more recently, then evidently it is only reasonable to 
accept the latter version. 

One missionary whom I knew set himself seriously to combating 
the new and strange doctrines which he found springing up among 
his flock. This was Dr. Marsh, the medical missionary of the Pres- 
byterian Church at Point Barrow. No doubt he knew some of these 
remarkable phases of Eskimo Christianity before, but certain things 
which he found astounding were brought to his attention in the 
winter of 1908-09, after living some time with the Colville Eskimo. 
In his next Sunday's sermon he took up two or three of the peculiar 
local beliefs I had called to his attention, and denied explicitly that 
there was any authority for them. I heard Eskimo discussions of 
these sermons afterward, and the point of view was this : 

In the old days one shaman knew what another shaman did not 
know, and naturally among the missionaries one of them knew 
things of which another had never heard. In the old days they had 
looked upon a shaman who knew a taboo that another did not know 
as the wiser of the two, and why should they not similarly look 
upon him as the wiser missionary who knew commands of God of 
which another missionary had never heard ? Was it not possible, 
was it not, in fact, altogether likely, that there were wiser mission- 
aries than Dr. Marsh from whom these teachings might have origi- 
nally come ? 

As a matter of fact, most of these peculiar beliefs we are discussing 
were supposed to have originated in Kotzebue Sound, and were 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 431 

credited by the Eskimo to the white missionaries there, who are 
held in high esteem in all of western Arctic America as authorities on 
religious matters.. Dr. Marsh told me that every summer, after 
members of his congregation visited the Colville River, they brought 
with them large numbers of new doctrines which were entirely strange 
to him. At first I believe he imagined he could disabuse the minds 
of his congregation of these new beliefs; later he realized that he 
could not, and the net result of all his efforts was that the Eskimo 
became thoroughly dissatisfied with him as a religious teacher and 
asked to have him replaced by another. 

The story of how Dr. Marsh eventually left his field of work at 
Point Barrow is of considerable interest. The way in which I tell 
it may not give the complete story, but I believe that such facts as 
I state are to be relied upon ; at any rate, I give the version which is 
believed by the white men and Eskimo alike at Point Barrow. 

The chief occupation of the people at Point Barrow and Cape 
Smythe is bow-head whaling, and the harvest season is in the spring. 
Throughout the winter the ice has lain thick off the coast, unless 
there have been violent offshore gales. In the spring a crack, 
known as a lead, forms a mile or it may be five miles offshore, 
parallel to the coast, from Point Barrow running down southwest 
toward Bering Strait. This lead may be from a few yards to several 
miles in width, according to the direction and violence of the wind 
that causes it, and this forms a pathway along which the bow-head 
whales migrate from their winter feeding-grounds in the Pacific 
to their summer pastures in the Beaufort Sea. About the first of 
May the whales will begin to come. At that time the Eskimo whale- 
men, and during the last few years the white men also, take their 
boats and their whaling-gear out to the edge of the land-fast ice 
(called the floe), which, as we have said, may be from a mile to five 
miles off shore, and on the edge of the ice along the narrow lane of 
open water they keep watching day and night for the whales to 
appear. There is no regularity about the migration ; there may be 
a hundred whales in one day and then none for a whole week, and, 
according to the point of view of the white men, the day upon which 
the whales come is as likely as not to be a Sunday. 

Dr. Marsh was stationed at Cape Smythe for something like nine 



432 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

years, and then he went away for four or five, after which he returned 
to Cape Smythe again (in 1908). When he was there before, the 
Sabbath had not been kept, but upon his return he found that during 
the whaHng season the Eskimo whalemen would, at about noon on 
Saturday, begin to pull their boats back from the water and get 
everything ready for leaving them, and toward evening they would 
go ashore and remain ashore through the entire twenty-four hours 
of what they considered the duration of Sunday. They would sleep 
ashore on Sunday night and return to their boats Monday forenoon, 
with the result that they were seldom ready for whaling until noon 
on Monday. This was wasting two days out of seven in a whaling 
season of not over six weeks. 

This seemed to Dr. Marsh an unwise policy, and he expostulated 
with the people, pointing out that not only might the whales pass 
while they were ashore on Sunday, but it was quite possible that 
a northeast wind might blow up any time, breaking the ice and carry- 
ing their boats and gear away to sea, which, if it were to happen, 
would be a crushing calamity to the community as a whole, for the 
people get from the whales not only the bone that they sell to the 
traders, but also tons of meat upon which they will live the coming 
year. " But," they asked Dr. Marsh, "couldn't you ask God to see 
to it that the whales come on week days only, and that a northeast 
wind does not blow on Sunday while we are ashore ? " 

Dr. Marsh replied by explaining that in his opinion God has 
established certain laws according to which .He governs the universe 
and with the operation of which He is not likely to interfere even 
should Dr. Marsh entreat him to do so. We can tell by observation. 
Dr. Marsh pointed out, approximately what these laws are, and we 
should not ask God to change them but should arrange our conduct 
so as to fit in with things as we find He has established them. 

Thinking back to their old shamanistic days, the Eskimo remem- 
bered that some of the shamans had been powerful and others inefficient ; 
that one shaman could bring on a gale or stop it, while to another the 
weather was quite beyond control. I have often heard them talk 
about Dr. Marsh and compare him to an inefiicient shaman. Evi- 
dently his prayers could not be relied upon to control wind and 
weather, but that was no reason for supposing that other missionaries 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 433 

were equally powerless. They inquired from Eskimo who came from 
the Mackenzie district and from others who had been in Kotzebue 
Sound or at Point Hope, and these Eskimo said (truthfully or not, I 
do not know) that they had missionaries who told them that what- 
ever it was they asked of God He would grant it to them if they 
asked in the right way. Hearing this, the Point Barrow Eskimo 
grumbled, saying it was strange that other less important communities 
should have such able missionaries and they, the biggest and most 
prosperous of all the Eskimo villages, should have a man whose 
prayers were of no avail — that they were of no avail there was no 
doubt, for he himself had confessed it. They accordingly got an 
Eskimo who had been in school at Carlisle to write a letter to the 
Presbyterian Board of Home Missions in New York. This letter, 
no doubt, made various charges the details of which I do not 
kno\\j. 

We have already discussed the foundation for the first two of these 
charges. The foundation for the third is that in extremely cold 
winter weather the only sensible and comfortable way of dressing, as 
I know as well as Dr. Marsh, and as every one knows who has tried it, 
is to wear a fur coat next to the body with no underwear between. 
This is the way the Eskimo always dressed until recently, and a man 
who dresses so has naturally to take off his coat as soon as he comes 
into their overheated dwellings. It was, until two or three years ago, 
the custom of both men and women to sit in the houses stripped to the 
waist. There was nothing immodest about it in their eyes. They 
did not know that the human body is essentially vile and must be 
hidden from sight, until they learnt that fact from white men recently. 
It seems it has been certain missionaries chiefly that have warned 
them against the custom, and they therefore consider "You shall not 
take off your coat in the house" as one of the precepts of the new 
religion, to be broken only at the peril of one's immortal soul. 

Dr. Marsh several times spoke to me of these things, and remarked 
that when in college he had stripped a good deal more for rowing and 
for other exercises ; that the natural and unstudied taking off of one's 
coat for comfort in a house could not possibly be considered immodest, 
while there might be an opening for argument in the matter of the 
evening dress of our women, where the exact degree of exposure is 
2f 



434 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

studied and the whole comphcated costume is planned with malice 
aforethought. 

This he explained to the Eskimo also, and tried by his own example 
to get them to go back to the sensible way which they had practiced 
until a few years ago. But with them it was not a question of 
modesty or the reverse; it was merely that they understood that 
God had commanded them not to take off their coats in the house, 
and they meant to keep His commandments. If Dr. Marsh did not 
know that there was any such commandment, that was merely a 
sign that he was not well informed. On the other hand, if he really 
knew of the commandment and chose to break it for the sake of 
bodily comfort, then that might be a risk which he was willing to 
take, but one which they did not care to run. 

These men who had come to me now explained that while they 
were still of the opinion that Dr. Marsh was not very orthodox and 
that there were other missionaries better than he, they had only now 
begun to realize what hard straits they should be in if they or their 
families became sick. They had been thinking, they said, of how 
much they had profited in the past by Dr. Marsh's care of their sick, 
and of how many of the lives of their women he had saved at child- 
birth. In reply to all of this I had to explain to them, of course, that 
Captain Bailingerhad nothing to do with Dr. Marsh's leaving, and that 
all I could do was to go down to the office of the Presbyterian Mission 
Board sometime the following winter and have a talk with them about 
the situation. 

If you ask the missionaries working among the Alaskan or the 
Mackenzie River Eskimo whether they have been Christianized, 
they will say yes ; if you ask the Eskimo themselves whether they 
are Christians, they also will answer in the affirmative; and if you 
ask me, too, then so will I. But to supplement my answer I would 
like the privilege of explaining what kind of Christians they are, to 
explain which fact has been the purpose of this article. 

I am so great an admirer of the Eskimo before civilization changed 
them that it is not easy to get me to say that civilization has improved 
them in any material way, leaving aside, of course, the question of 
whether it profiteth a man that he gain the whole earth if he lose his 
own soul. But although it is not easy to get me to admit that the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKEVIO 435 

present-day Eskimo are far better men than their forefathers, it is 
easy to get them themselves to admit it. In fact, they are of late 
years rather prone to assert that they are better men than their an- 
cestors. To quote my man Ilavinirk again, he said to me one day : 
"The people of Kotzebue Sound were formerly very bad, but they 
are all good now. In my father's time and when I was young they 
used to lie and to steal and to work on Sunday." "But," I asked 
him, "don't they, as a matter of fact, tell lies now occasionally?" 
"Oh, yes, they sometimes do." "Well, don't they really, as a matter 
of fact, tell about as many lies now as they ever did ?" "Well, yes, 
perhaps they do." "And don't they, as a matter of fact, steal 
about as frequently as ever?" "Well, possibly. But they don't 
work on Sunday." 



REPORT ON THE NATURAL HISTORY COLLECTIONS 
OF THE EXPEDITION 

By Rudolph Mabtin Andekson, Ph.D. 

A NYTHING more than a cursory discussion of the topographi- 
L\ cal and geological features of the regions visited ^ — from 
-* — J^ Point Barrow, Alaska, east to the middle portion of Corona- 
tion Gulf and southern Victoria Island — is impossible within the 
limits of this chapter. A fairly complete series of the various rock 

1 For the convenience of readers of these notes, the following record of 
routes traveled, with dates, is given : 

April 15th- August 13th, 1908. New York to Edmonton, Alberta ; Atha- 
baska Landing, Athabaska River, Athabaska Lake, Slave River, Great 
Slave Lake, Mackenzie River, Mackenzie Bay, to Herschel Island, Yukon 
Territory, Canada. 

August 14th, 1908-August 21st, 1909. Herschel Island, Canada, west 
to Flaxman Island, Alaska ; Hula-hula River, and Endicott Mountains ; 
Chandlar River (south side of Endicott Mountains), northeast Alaska, to 
Hula-hula River ; Flaxman Island ; west to Smith Bay, and east again to 
Colville River delta, Alaska ; up Colville River to mouth of Itkillik River, 
and down Colville to Beeche Point ; east to Flaxman Island, Alaska ; De- 
marcation Point ; to Herschel Island, Canada. 

August 22d, 1909-March 14th, 1910. Herschel Island, Canada, east 
through Mackenzie River delta, to Richard Island, N.W.T., Toker Point, 
Cape Brown, Cape Dalhousie, Liverpool Bay, Nicholson Island, Baillie 
Island, Cape Bathurst, Franklin Bay, Horton River, Langton Bay, Cape 
Parry, Booth Island, and back to Langton Bay. 

March 15th-Deeember 13th, 1910. Langton Bay, along west coast of 
Franklin Bay, across the Smoking Mountains to Horton River, down Horton 
River to Franklin Bay, Baillie Island, Liverpool, across country to McKinley 
Bay, to east side of eastern estuary of the Mackenzie River, Richard Island, 
through east branch of Mackenzie delta, to Point Separation, Peel River, 
Fort McPherson ; through west branch of Mackenzie delta, to Tent Island, 
Shingle Point, Herschel Island ; on board S. S. Herman to Baillie Island, 
Cape Bathurst ; Franklin Bay, Langton Bay ; across Melville Mountains 
to Horton River; to Darnley Bay, Cape Lyon, and back to Langton Bay. 

December 13th, 1910-April 14th, 1911. Langton Bay, N. W. T., Canada, 
across Melville Mountains to Horton River, up Horton River, across the 
Barren Grounds to Great Bear Lake, Dease River, Caribou Point, Dismal 
Lake, Kendall River, Coppermine River, and Coronation Gulf. 

436 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 437 

formations were taken for the American Museum of Natural History, 
of New York City, and the Dominion Geological Survey, of Ottawa, 
Canada, and is now being worked up in detail by the geologists and 
petrologists of the Survey. 

The north coast of Alaska is a comparatively flat tundra plain, 
ten or fifteen miles wide, a little west of Herschel Island (in Canada), 
and seventy-five or one hundred miles wide at the Colville, the 
largest river flowing into the Arctic Ocean in northern Alaska. A 
number of fairly large and comparatively unknown rivers flow down 
from the Endicott range through this tundra plain, and lakes and 
ponds are numerous. 

Although they have been nearly neglected by the cartographers, 
some of the North Alaskan rivers are large — the Colville with a 
delta forty miles across, and an innumerable maze of channels and 
islands. The Sharavanktok, east of the Colville, has a delta about 
fifteen miles wide, with the usual number of low, flat islands and 
mud bars outside of its mouth. All of these northern Alaskan rivers, 
being rapid, carry out considerable silt, sand, and gravel, which is 
deposited in flat alluvial islands, or shoved up by the heavy sea ice 
into long sandspits or bars outside of the mouths of the rivers. Two 
of these rivers, the Ku'gu-rak, flowing into the Arctic Ocean near 
Flaxman Island, and the Hula-hula and the Ok-pi'lak, which come 
out near Barter Island, have been recently explored geologically by 
Mr. E. de K. LeflSngwell, and his results here, as well as in charting 

April 15th-Deeember 31st, 1911. Coronation Gulf (about 75 miles 
east of the mouth of the Coppermine River), to Coppermine River, Dismal 
Lake, Dease River ; back to Coronation Gulf (spring collecting around mouth 
of Kogaryuak River, about 18 miles east of Coppermine River) ; Duke of 
York Archipelago ; Lady Franklin Point, Austin Bay, Simpson Bay, Dolphin 
and Union straits. Point Williams, Cape Kendall, Cape Baring (Victoria 
Island) ; Amundsen Gulf, Darnley Bay, Cape Parry, Franklin Bay, Langton 
Bay, to Baillie Island ; to Booth Island, Langton Bay, Horton River, and 
back to Langton Bay. 

January Ist-November 1st, 1912. Langton Bay, N.W.T., Canada, to 
BaiUie Island, Cape Bathurst ; back to Langton Bay, Darnley Bay, Horton 
River, Liverpool Bay, Harrowby Bay, the Smoking Mountains, Franklin 
Bay ; on board S. S. Belvedere to Amundsen Gulf, around the southern end 
of Banks Island ; Booth Island, Herschel Island ; Point Barrow, Cape 
Smyth, Alaska; Herald Island, Bering Straits, Bering Sea, Unalaska, and 
North Pacific Ocean, to San Francisco. 



438 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

a part of the hitherto very imperfectly mapped north coast of Alaska, 
will doubtless soon be made available through the publications of 
the United States Geological Survey and the United States Coast and 
Geodetic Survey. My own expeditions up the Hula-hula River, 
into the Endicott Mountains, and on a branch of the Chandlar 
River (a northern tributary of the Yukon), were made in mid- 
winter, primarily for hunting, and under conditions very unfavor- 
able for collecting geological specimens, or transporting heavy 
collections of any kind. 

The great delta of the Mackenzie, over one hundred miles wide, 
is a maze of low, flat, alluvial islands, well timbered with spruce 
nearly as far north as the south end of Richard Island, and dense 
willow thickets which gradually diminish in height and luxuriance 
as the outer rim of islands is approached. The steep bluffs at Tu- 
nun-irk, the southern tip of Richard Island, which are from one 
hundred to one hundred fifty feet high, with rolling hills behind, are 
apparently a continuation of the Reindeer Hills, which extend along 
the eastern side of the Mackenzie delta, and outcrop in the last 
stratified rock on the river's eastern bank some distance below the 
head of the delta. From the eastern side of the Mackenzie delta 
to Liverpool Bay the country is low and flat with numerous small 
lakes and ponds. The so-called Esquimaux Lake of the older charts 
is now known to consist of a chain of lakes extending from near the 
Mackenzie and running into the southeast corner of Liverpool Bay, 
west of the mouth of the Anderson River. The Eskimo Lakes have 
long been used as a winter portage route by the Mackenzie River 
and Cape Bathurst Eskimo. Another portage which I followed 
with a large Eskimo party in the spring of 1910 extends from tlie 
west side of Liverpool Bay, crossing a rather high ridge of rounded 
hills on the west side of Liverpool Bay, and thence westward along 
a chain of ten small lakes to a place on the coast called Nu-vo'rak 
(the Point Atkinson of Sir John Richardson). These lakes are 
nearly elliptical in shape, with long axes approximately southeast 
to northwest, and separated by only narrow ridges not more than 
three or four feet high. A range of low rolling hills to the southw^ard 
separates this chain of small lakes from the larger Eskimo Lakes. 

A conspicuous feature of the country east of the Mackenzie, near 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 439 

Kittigaryuit (Point Encounter), Toker Point, Warren Point, and to 
a lesser extent east of this region, are large rounded hills of mud or 
clay, rising from fifty to one hundred twenty-five feet in height 
from the flat plain surrounding. These hills, called pi-nok-tja'lu-it 
by the local Eskimo, are sometimes hemispherical, with either 
smooth or furrowed sides, and sometimes in the shape of a truncated 
cone, with a crater in the center, like an extinct volcano. One of 
the most typical "mud volcanoes" of this type is situated on the 
flat plain at the base of the Parry Peninsula between Langton Bay 
and Darnley Bay — a landmark for many miles. In summer this 
crater has a pool of water in its bottom. 

Qoing east from the Mackenzie along the coast, the first indurated 
formations appear at Maitland Point (Ik-pi-sug'yok — "big bluff"), 
cliffs of gray shales rising nearly vertical for forty or fifty feet above 
sea level, breaking down into irregular-shaped fragments. At the 
eastern end of Harrowby Bay, which extends into the Cape Bathurst 
peninsula within four or five miles of the west side of Franklin Bay, 
much farther than the charts indicate, the ground on top and sides 
of the bluffs is light ashy gray clay, overlying small exposures of thin 
leaves of broken gray shales with yellowish efilorescence or inter- 
calations. 

East of the Baillie Islands (Cape Bathurst), along the west side 
of Franklin Bay, are found the so-called "Smoking Mountains," or 
burning cliffs. These were noted as burning in 1826 and again in 
1847 by Sir John Richardson. Within recent times, from our own 
observations, and information derived from whalers and Eskimo, 
we know that these fires may smolder for years in one place, then 
die down, and burst out in another place some distance away. Most 
of these smoke- and gas-emitting fire-holes are along the coast, but 
combustion is also going on in one or two places on Horton River, 
which runs nearly parallel with and only a few miles from the coast, 
behind the mountains on the southwest side of Franklin Bay. 

In 1912, the most westerly smoking cliffs were about thirty miles 
east of Cape Bathurst, and fifteen miles northwest of the mouth of 
Horton River. Smoke was also seen oozing out of the cliffs at various 
points as far as thirty miles east of Horton River. I was never able 
to see live coals or flames, although the soil is often hot above the 



440 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

smoke-holes. In spring and early summer the clouds of vapor are 
much more dense, probably due to steam formed by melting snow- 
water percolating on the heated rock. The smell in the vicinity is 
always strongly sulphurous. The burning material is apparently a 
black carbonaceous shale which is much in evidence on the west side 
of Franklin Bay and on Horton River back of Langton Bay, and 
varying much in quality, according to the amount of clay it contains. 
The belief of the Cape Bathurst Eskimo was that these subterranean 
fires were kept alive by spirits (turn 'rat) and they were accustomed 
to leave small offerings of food when passing with their sleds. Failure 
to leave these votive offerings was supposed to be followed by the 
death of the offending party within one year. 

The sea-cliffs along the west side of Franklin Bay are usually 
steep, particularly at Whale Bluff (Kingak), a precipice of shale 
about eighteen miles east of Cape Bathurst. Still farther east are 
exposures of yellow dolomite near sea-level with leafy intercalations 
of gypsum. In many places the cliffs are washed down or caved in 
as a result of the fires smoldering below, and often the surface ex- 
posures show evidence of being residue of the burned cliffs. Some 
masses resemble vitrified brick or coal clinkers, others are yellowish, 
of clayey or cheesy consistency, or are composed of various shades 
of soft red ochraceous pigment, in many places of brilliant hue. 
These ochers make a very serviceable paint even when mixed with 
nothing more than seal oil. The water in ponds and rivulets all 
along this section of coast in summer is usually very bad and almost 
undrinkable, being strongly impregnated with alum or other astrin- 
gent salts. 

No coal is exposed along the shores of Franklin Bay itself, although 
I found two thin seams of finely crumbled bits of black lignite between 
layers of fine loose sand, in cut bank about forty feet above sea-level, 
in sea-bluffs about one and a half miles west of Langton Bay Harbor. 
Occasionally large, loose slabs of light, brittle coal, ranging from 
shiny, black, glossy, clean-fracturing lumps, to shapeless pieces of 
light brown lignite composed of little changed plant stems and roots, 
are found on the hills around Langton Bay. South of Langton Bay 
from fifteen to forty miles, across the Melville Range, coal outcrops 
in numerous places in the sides of deep gullies and valleys cut by 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 441 

Horton River and its numerous tributary creeks — veins from one 
inch to two feet in thickness, alternating with strata of fine sand, 
friable sandstones, and shales. Some of this coal is of good quality, 
burns readily in a camp stove, and is readily accessible. 

Associated with the coal veins on Horton River are carboniferous 
shales, which often have hard streaks of iron pyrites running through 
them. Spherical nodules of iron pyrites are very common in the 
soft sandstone banks of Horton River south of Langton Bay, and are 
numerous in places on the river's edge, weathered out from the banks. 
Short, thin strata of sharp, brad-like spicules are also found here. 
Farther upstream, Horton River passes through two long series of 
rampart cliffs — composed of finely grained limestones, with here 
and there patches of o5lite, quartz crystals, and occasional masses of 
calcite. 

The rock formations beginning on the east side of Franklin Bay 
are stratified limestones, often wave-worn into arches facing the sea. 
On the east side of Cracroft Bay, the upper surface of the limestone 
rock is planed perfectly flat and smooth, but scored with small but 
distinct strise, overlain with fine yellowish clayey sand and rounded 
bowlders. Cape Parry and the west side of Darnley Bay show lime- 
stone of similar appearance, the limestone often weathering out into 
irregular cavities or pockets. 

From Cape Lyon and eastward to about sixty-five miles east of 
the mouth of the Coppermine River, the sea-cliffs, where exposed, 
are dark-colored columnar basalt or diabase. Specimens from Cape 
Lyon and Point Deas Thompson are finer-grained than specimens 
from near the mouth of the Coppermine and the Duke of York 
Archipelago (Coronation Gulf), and specimens from farther east 
(seventy-five miles east of the Coppermine) are still coarser-grained. 
Mr. R. W. Brock, Director of the Dominion Geological Survey, who 
has had our collections painstakingly examined, informs me that 
only two out of more than fifty specimens of this rock formation 
failed to show traces of copper. 

The rock formations on the north side of Dolphin and LTnion 
Straits (southwestern Victoria Island) are stratified limestone, and 
the columnar pillars of diabase which form most of the islands of 
Coronation Gulf sometimes show strata of limestone beneath them 



442 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

near sea-level. Sandstone is also found below the diabase in some 
places. About sixty-five miles east of the mouth of the Copper- 
mine River red granitic rock appears at sea-level and forms many 
little barren rock islands near shore. In the bottom of Kogaryuak 
River, about eighteen miles east of the mouth of the Coppermine 
River, indurated shales of reddish and gray color are found in the 
bed of the river. Shales, slate, and limestone also appear along the 
banks of the Coppermine River above Bloody Fall. At Bloody Fall, 
the Coppermine River cuts a gorge through a mass of the dark- 
colored diabase rock. Overlying and fringing this mass of diabase 
just south of Bloody Fall on both sides of the Coppermine River 
are a series of high, steep hills, composed of a very fine, light-colored, 
homogeneous clay, like potter's clay. These clay hills extend some 
distance east of the Coppermine River, parallel with the coast. 

The pot-stone, a talc chlorite schist, as described by Hanbury, 
and used by the Eskimo for making blubber-lamps and cooking-pots, 
appears, from all accounts, to be found only at and east of a point 
near the mouth of Tree River (Kog-luk-tu-a'luk), some seventy-five 
miles east of the mouth of the Coppermine River. Although this 
kind of stone is not known to be found in the Eskimo country to the 
westward, lamps of this peculiar stone have passed by barter as far 
west as Point Barrow, in early times, i.e. before the advent of white 
men. Owing to the great amount of labor involved in quarrjdng 
out slabs of stone of the proper size, and the time required to work 
them into utensils, with the very primitive tools which are used, 
these soft stone lamps and pots are valued rather highly by the people. 

The whole region is apparently rich in copper, from at least as 
far east as Bathurst Inlet, where large masses were seen in situ by 
Hanbury. Natives of the Coronation Gulf region told us that they 
usually make their implements, such as knives, arrow-and-spear 
heads, and the like, from small pieces of float which they pick up on 
the coast of Coronation Gulf, along the Coppermine River, and in 
the region north of Dismal Lake and west of the Coppermine. Large 
masses of copper were less seldom used because of the difficulty of 
cutting out pieces of suitable size. From the greater amount of 
copper implements in the hands of the natives of Prince Albert 
Sound, southwestern Victoria Island, and from the information which 




k 










V 
5- ^. 




1. Columnar Basalt underlaid by Stratified Limestone. 
2. A View of Two Islands, from the Southwest, the Nearer One a Half- 

MiLE Distant. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 443 

they gave Mr. Stefansson, it is probable that the surface deposits, 
at least of free native copper, are richer in western Victoria Island 
than they are on the mainland around Coronation Gulf. 

Besides iron pyrites used for kindling fire iron is apparently un- 
known to the Eskimo of this region except as in implements or in 
fragments of iron or steel obtained directly or indirectly from white 
men. The art of smelting is unknown, and the only other metallic 
substances which we found in use were Galena, or Galenite (PbS), 
and red oxide of lead. The latter is often used by Coronation Gulf 
and Victoria Island Eskimo for coloring skins red. I was unable 
to find out where this mineral is to be found in situ, but the Eskimo 
say that they sometimes pick it up on the sea beach in Coronation 
Gulf. The Galenite is frequently used by the same Eskimo for 
blackening skins. Specimens of Galenite were found in old house 
ruins at Langton Bay, although this mineral was not otherwise ob- 
served west of Dolphin and Union Straits and none was seen in situ. 

The most distinctive feature of the innumerable islands of Coro- 
nation Gulf is the fact that they lie in parallel series approximately 
east and west, or trending slightly to a northeast-southwest direction. 
These islands almost invariably have vertical sea-cliffs fronting to 
the south or southeast, and sloping down to the sea on the north and 
northwest, forming an angle of about fifteen degrees with the horizon. 
The same terraced formation of diabase rock is continued on the 
mainland west and southwest of Coronation Gulf, from around Cape 
Kendall to about thirty miles south of the Gulf on the east side of 
the Coppermine River. East of the Coppermine River the hills 
are in general more barren than farther west, even the most bleak 
uplands have little pockets and valleys of green, visible here and there, 
when surveyed from the higher vantage points in summer — vegeta- 
tion enough to support small bands of Caribou in almost any locality. 

TREES 

The great northward extension of the tree line, or the northern 
limit of the growth of trees, in many localities far north of the Arctic 
Circle, is noteworthy. Our travels and observations enable us to 
extend the far-flung line of the conifers considerably beyond the 



444 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

limits assigned by previous maps, in many cases. In discussing 
"trees" we shall follow the vernacular of the North, and restrict 
the term to evergreen or coniferous trees, the White Spruce, Picea 
canadensis (Mill.) B. S. P., and Black Spruce, Picea Mariana (Mill.) 
B. S. P., excluding the numerous species of Willows (Salix) which, in 
their creeping or ground forms, struggle up to very high latitudes. 

In Alaska, according to the consensus of reports from Eskimo 
hunters, there are no conifers found north of the Endicott Mountains 
except a few on one of the eastern tributaries of the Colville. Most 
of the mountain rivers, however, have large, scrubby willows growing 
in the deeper mountain valleys and gullies, enough to supply the 
scanty fuel necessities of Eskimo hunting parties, and in some places 
even large enough to supply material for the manufacture of snow- 
shoes and tent-poles. On the Hula-hula River, inside of the foot- 
hills, just at the foot of the high mountains, I saw one little bunch of 
Poplars five or six feet high, probably Aspen Poplar (Populus tremu- 
loides Michx.), but no other Poplars were seen except in the Mac- 
kenzie delta, a few on the lower Horton River, and around Dease 
River, at the east end of Great Lake Bear. 

In the Mackenzie delta, the great wilderness of low, flat islands is 
heavily forested with spruce, the timber extending in some places to 
tide water. At the mouth of the Peel River, far north of the Circle, 
tall, straight spruce of more than a foot in diameter grow densely. 
The Canoe Birch (Betula papyrifers Marsh) and the Aspen Poplar 
(Popidus tremuloides Michx.) are also found in small numbers in the 
Mackenzie delta. East of the Mackenzie there is a little fringe of 
spruce on the Eskimo Lakes, and the forests come nearly to the coast 
on the Anderson River, south of Liverpool Bay. South of Langton 
Bay, the northernmost spruce trees come within ten or twelve miles 
of the coast on a large creek valley tributary to Horton River. Hor- 
ton River has a pretty continuous fringe of spruce trees all along the 
bottom of its deep sinuous valley through the "Barren Grounds," 
from about forty miles of its mouth on the west side of Franklin Bay 
to within sixty miles of Great Bear Lake. Great Bear Lake is sur- 
rounded by a continuous belt of timber, the Dease River is well 
timbered, and trees are found along the banks of the Coppermine 
River up to within twenty miles of Coronation Gulf. The most 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 445 

northern bunch of spruce trees in this region is within six miles of 
the coast on a little creek valley several miles east of the Coppermine 
River, but these trees are scrubby and dwarfed. In a small, isolated 
grove of spruce near Kendall River, a few miles west of the Copper- 
mine River, and not far from Dismal Lake, I measured one tree 
which was four feet and six inches in circumference, five feet above 
the ground and above the bench roots ; the same tree was five feet 
in circumference, three feet above the ground. None of these trees 
were very high, but were mostly straight-grained, and not twisted 
spirally as are most of the spruce in this region. 

NOTES ON PLANTS 

Very few plants outside of the trees and woody shrubs are put to 
economic use by the Eskimo. North of the limit of trees, the 
various species of shrub and ground willows are burned, as is also the 
Northern Dwarf Birch (Betula nana Linn.). The latter, known as 
"partridge-brush" in the Great Bear Lake region, as 6k-fuk'tok 
by Alaskan Eskimo, and as av-al-lu'kret by the Coronation Gulf 
people, burns with a fierce heat, even when green, and can be used 
in a camp-stove if twisted into bunches. On the Barren Grounds, 
a species of heather, Cassiope tetragona (L.) D. Don., is much used 
for fuel, particularly in the summer-time. It burns either green or dry, 
and can even be dug from under the snow and burned in winter. 
This species, or one very similar to it, is common in various places — 
in the Endicott Mountains, Alaska ; King Point, Yukon Territory ; 
Langton Bay, Coronation Gulf, Dismal Lake, Dease River, and 
Great Bear Lake. It is called Ik-hlu''tit by the Coronation Gulf 
Eskimo; Pi-la-rau-u'it by western Alaskan Eskimo (Port 
Clarence) ; and jTu-kak-shi-u'uit by Mackenzie delta Eskimo. 
The inner bark of the Mountain Alder, Alnus alnohetula (Ehrh.) 
Koch., is often used to stain the inner side of tanned skins red. 

The only roots which I have seen used as food by the Eskimo are 
the roots of a species of Knotweed — either Polygonum bistortum 
(Tourn.) L., Polygonum viviparum L., or Polygonum fugax Small. 
The roots of plants of this genus, known to the Eskimo as Ma'su, 
or Ma'shu, are frequently dug and eaten in summer, but usually 



446 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

only when there is a scarcity of meat or fish for food. These roots 
are fairly edible, either raw or cooked, having a slightly sweetish 
taste, but are somewhat woody and fibrous. On the Colville River, 
Alaska, the Eskimo preserve the Masu roots in sealskin "pokes," 
and eat them in a somewhat fermented state. Several species of 
small ground-growing berries are often eaten by the western Eskimo, 
particularly a yellow berry called Ak'pek (the Cloudberry, 
Ruhus chamoemarus Linn.), the At'tsi-ak (Alpine Bearberry, 
Mairania alpina (Linn.) Desv.), and the paun'rat (Crowberry, 
Evipetrum nigrum Linn.). These berries are eaten by the Corona- 
tion Gulf Eskimo, except the akpek, the use of which is unknown, 
although in the opinion of white men and of the western Eskimo it is 
the best of all local berries. They are eaten by the Mackenzie Eskimo, 
but they say they did not use them extensively until taught to do so by 
the Alaskan Eskimo (not more than twenty-five years ago). The 
leaves of Oxyria digyna (L.), a species of sorrel, are frequently mixed 
with seal-oil and eaten as a sort of salad by the western Eskimo. 
The plant is called Ko'na-ritj by Alaskan Eskimo. The partly 
digested stomach contents of the Barren Ground caribou are fre- 
quently eaten frozen in winter. Stomachs filled with reindeer-moss 
are considered much better than those from caribou which have 
been feeding on the coarse, woody fibers of grassy plants. As with 
most other viands, this dish is not considered complete without a 
liberal dressing of seal-oil. 

The collecting of plants on the expedition was only incidental for 
the greater part of the time, owing to lack of facilities for preserving 
and transporting specimens. A collection mainly of flowering plants 
from the north coast of Alaska was completely lost. A small lot 
of plants which survived the vicissitudes of northern travel were 
turned over to the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Park, New 
York City, and were very kindly determined by Dr. P. A. Rydberg, 
as follows : 

Coronation Gulf. Mouth of Kogaryuak River, eighteen miles 
east of Coppermine River, Arctic coast, Canada, June 18th, lOlL 
Salix arctica Pallas. Rather small specimen. 
Draba hirta L. Tall specimen. 
Astragalus sp. An unknown species, somewhat resembling A. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 447 

alpinus, but more slender, \^'itli small, narrow, grayish, hir- 
sute leaflets, purple only on the tip of the keel, black-hair}' calyx 
shorter than in A. alpinus. No fruit is found, which makes it 
impossible to characterize the plant fully. 

Lupinus arcticus S. Wats. A form more grayish-pubescent than the 
Victoria Island specimen. 

Hedysarum mackenzii Richards. A low specimen. 

Rhododendron lapponicum L. (This species is abundant on south 
side of Coronation Gulf.) 

Cassiope tetragona D. Don. Luxuriant specimens. (Used for fuel.) 

Pedicularis lanata Willd. Fair specimen. 

Pedicularis arctica R. Br. Good specimen. 

Southwestern Victoria Island, fifteen miles east of Point Williams, 

July 21st, 1911. 

Salix phlebophyUa And. Specimen with rather large leaves. 

Papaver radicatum Rottb. In fruit. 

Dryas integrifolia Vahl. Both the typical and the lobed-leaved 
forms. 

Potent ilia pidchella R. Br. Good specimen mth rather narrow leaf. 

Lupinus ardicm S. Wats. The t^^pical form. 

Mairania alpina (L.) Desv. In leaves only. It is probably the 
red-fruited form. 

Androsace chammasme arctica Kunth. Excellent specimens. 

Staiice sibirica (Turcz.) Ledeb. Good specimens. 

Chrysanthemum iniegrifolium Richards. Small specimen. 

Cape Bathurst, Arctic coast, Northwest Territory, Canada, 

July 6th, 1912. 

Salix anglorum Cham. Tv'pical. 

Oxyria digyna (L.) Compt. Good specimens. (Often eaten as a 
relish.) 

Ranunculus 7iivalis L. Good tj-pical specimens. 

Draba glacialis Adams. In young flowers, small-leaved. 

Cochlearis grosnlandica L. In flowers. 

Androsace chamaeiasme arctica Kunth. Excellent spiecimens. 

Primula horealis Duby. Just beginning to bloom, therefore pedicils 
rather short. 

Phlox richardsonii Hook. Best specimens seen of this rare plant. 



448 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Pneumaria maritima (L.) Hill. Good specimens. 

King Point, Arctic coast, Yukon Territory, Canada, August 27tli, 
1912. 
Polygonum fugax Small. Out of bloom and spike gone, but probably 

this form. 
Vaccinim Vitis-Idcsa L. Only a fragment. 
Valeriana capitata Pallas. Rather small specimen. 

INSECTS 

I While the Arctic regions cannot boast of the number of in- 
sects to be found in more southern latitudes, certain species are 
found in numbers almost beyond belief. The mosquito, Kik- 
to'ri-ak of the Eskimos, is a weariness to the flesh during at least 
two of the summer months in nearly all parts of the North. Im- 
mediately on the coast they may be kept down at times by cold 
on-shore breezes, but a few miles from the coast will usually find 
them in almost unbearable numbers. I have found it difficult to 
shoot a rifle, and have seen dogs practically blinded by mosquito 
stings closing up their eyes. Several species of small flies, blue- 
bottle flies, and a large species of Tabanus are also common at times. 
The larger flies are called Niv-i-o'wak by the Eskimo. The 
Barren Ground caribou are much annoyed in summer by a species 
of bot-fly which deposits its eggs under the skin. These eggs hatch 
under the skin, and by the month of February the encysted grubs 
are about the same size and appearance of a white navy bean. By 
the early part of June, when the grubs drop out on the ground, they 
are about an inch in length, with rough, encircling bands. Summer- 
killed caribou skins are often almost worthless on account of being 
riddled by the holes made by these grubs. The grubs of the caribou, 
as well as lice and other parasites found on human beings and lower 
animals, are indiscriminately classed together as Ko'mait (sing. 
K5'mak). Beetles and other small insects, as well as small water- 
dwelhng larvae, are cafled Ko-pi'la-rok. 

Bumblebees are very widely distributed, and fairly common in 
many places. I observed them at a number of points on the north 
coast of Alaska, the Mackenzie delta, Franklin Bay, Coronation 
Gulf, and Victoria Island. A number of specimens of Bumblebees 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 449 

were brought back somewhat the worse for preservation in alcohol, but 
Dr. Frank E. Lutz, Assistant Curator of the Department of Inverte- 
brate Zoology of the American Museum of Natural History, who has 
been working them up, informs me that they seem to be as follows : 

Bomhus frigidus F. Sm. Athabaska River, Alberta. 

Bomhus polaris Curt. Mainland, east of Richard Island, Mackenzie 

delta. 
Bomhus sylvicola Kirby. Langton Bay, N.W.T., June 15th, 1910. 
Bomhus sp. Either a new species or variety of B. occidentalis. 

Coronation Gulf, June 10th, 1911. 

Dr. Lutz also kindly furnished me with a list of the Coleoptera 
collected, so far as they have been identified : 
Cicindela vulgaris Say. Boiler Rapid, Athabaska River, Fort Chipe- 

wyan. 
Cicindela hirticollis Say. Boiler Rapid, Athabaska River. 
Cicindela 12-guUata var. oregona Lee. Fort Chipewyan. 
Carahus vietinghovi Adams. Mackenzie River delta. 
Carabus haccivoru^ Fisch. Richard Island, Mackenzie River delta. 
Ophistomu^ richardsoni Kirby. Boiler Rapid, Athabaska River. 
Amara hrunneipennis Dej. Mainland east of Mackenzie delta. 
Amara sp. Richard Island, Mackenzie delta. 
Hippodamia parenthesis Say. Athabaska River. 
Hippodamia sinuata var. spuria Lee. Smith's Portage, Slave River. 
Ceratomegilla ulkei Cr. Mackenzie River delta, Richard Island. 
Colymhetes sculptilis Harr. Richard Island, Mackenzie delta. 
Colymhetes sp. Coronation Gulf. 
Grynius sp. Richard Island, Mackenzie delta. 
Silpha lapponica Hbst. Langton Bay, Coronation Gulf, Richard 

Island. 
Dicerca divaricata Say. Smith's Portage, Slave River. 
Thanasimus duhius Fab. Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabaska. 
Merium proteus Kirby. Athabaska River. 
Rhagium lineatum Oliv. 

Acmoeops proteus Kirby. Smith's Landing, Slave River. 
Disonycha alternata 111. Boiler Rapid, Athabaska River. 
Entomescells adonides Fab. Athabaska River, Alberta. 
2q 



450 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

FISHES 

Fish play probably a more important part than anything else in 
the domestic economy of the Eskimo of the western Arctic coast. 
The list of food fishes is not large, but the number of individuals is 
so great that a family supplied with a gill-net or two can travel in 
summer along practically the whole Arctic coast, and be reasonably 
sure of catching enough fish for themselves and dogs at nearly every 
camping-place. When all the food required for a family can be 
obtained by merely putting out a fish-net every night and clearing it 
every morning, making a living is not a difficult matter. The Mac- 
kenzie delta is preeminently a fish country, fish being the staple food 
throughout the year — fresh in summer, and usually in a tainted or 
semi-putrid state in winter. Fish taken early in the fall are stored 
away in large caches, and generally become more or less tainted 
before they freeze. The tainted fish are always eaten raw and frozen. 
As usual where game and fish are very easy to obtain in season, the 
natives generally underestimate their needs for the winter, and have 
a period of shortage in the early spring. 

West of Franklin Bay the common method of fishing is by gill- 
nets, set along the shore or across the mouths of rivers and creeks, 
rigged with sinkers and floats, and set from a kayak or shoved out 
into the water with a very long pole made of driftwood sticks spliced 
together. In winter the usual method is by "jigging" through holes 
in the ice with barbless hooks of bone, ivory, or silver, although some- 
times nets are set under the ice. Nets are set under the ice by cut- 
ting a series of holes through the ice, a few feet apart, and poking 
a line under the ice by means of long, curved willow poles, or by 
putting a long stick float with line attached under the ice and work- 
ing it along from hole to hole with another forked stick. After a 
stout line has been passed beneath the ice, connecting the two holes 
at opposite ends of the line, the net is easily drawn under the ice and 
taken out and cleared of fish at will by merely chopping open the 
two end holes, the intervening holes being useless after the line has 
once been passed under the ice. 

East of Dolphin and Union Straits, the Eskimo do not use fish 
for food so extensively as do the natives farther west. They have no 




O o 

§ 2 



< S 



M 



O 

O 

■< 

Q , 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 451 

fish-nets, and catch fish through the ice with crude copper and bone 
hooks, or spear them while ascending shallows or rapids in the streams 
during the summer. 

Our collection of fishes is not at all complete, and although most 
of the important food fishes are represented, a few were unavoidably 
omitted. The specimens brought were kindly determined by Mr. 
John Treadwell Nichols, Assistant Curator of Recent Fishes, De- 
partment of Ichthyology and Herpetology, American Museum of 
Natural History, New York City. 

Catostomus catostomus (FoTster). Long-nosed Sucker. Mil-lu'i-ak — 
name given by Eskimo of northern Alaska and the Mackenzie 
delta. Mi'luk — milk ; mil-lu'i-ak — he milks, or sucks. 
Found commonly in parts of the Mackenzie delta; not valued 
very highly as a food fish by the Eskimo, and used only for dog- 
food when other fish are obtainable. Specimen taken in Colville 
River, Alaska, July 4th, 1909, identified by Nichols. 
Argyrosomus tullihee (Richardson). Tullibee. Toolaby. No speci- 
mens of this fish were brought back, but from the general ap- 
pearance of the fish, it is probably the species known to the 
Mackenzie Eskimo as pi-kok'tok. 
This fish is taken commonly in branches of the east side of 
Mackenzie delta, and we caught large numbers in nets set under 
the ice of a large lake south of Langton Bay. It resembles some- 
what another fish called the An-ark'hlirk. The An-ark'hlirk is 
much more highly regarded by the Eskimo than is the pi-kok'tok, 
because the former species is usually fatter. The pi-kok'tok is 
usually without much fat, and the flesh is rather coarse and tasteless. 
Leucichthys lucidus (Richardson). Great Bear Lake Herring. 
Kak'tak (pi. Kak'tat), the name given by all Eskimo from 
northern Alaska east to Cape Bathurst. 
The most common food fish, found almost everywhere along the 
coast, and for some distance up into the larger rivers. We found 
the species common as far east as Coronation Gulf. It is generally 
taken in gill-nets, during the whole summer, but in early spring at 
the time when the ice-sea opens up into cracks (early in June, and 
later), large numbers are caught with hooks through holes or cracks, 



452 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

or from the edge of floating or grounded ice-cakes near shore. 
This fish is the species commonly spoken of as " Whitefish" by white 
men and English-speaking natives along the Arctic coast. Specimen 
from Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, identified by Nichols. 
Clupea pallasii Cuvier and Valenciennes. California Herring. 

Great numbers come into the Cape Bathurst sandspit during the 
latter part of August. Only occasional stragglers appear during 
the middle of the month. On August 3d, 1911, we ran one end of a 
200-foot sweep-net out from the beach with a dory, and drew in 
about thirteen barrels of Herring (about 3000 fish) at one sweep. A 
very few Leucichthys lucidus were taken in this haul. Three days 
later, at the same place, two hauls brought in about a barrel and a 
half of Herring and about two barrels of "Whitefish." The Herring 
were very fat, one Herring being as satisfying as two much larger 
"Whitefish." The Baillie Islands Eskimo say that the Herring were 
never caught here before the white men came (a little over twenty 
years ago), and think that the Herring followed the white men in. 
The explanation seems to be that the Herring schools come in only 
periodically, and not often close inshore, while the Eskimo did not 
use long seines, confining their fishing operations to short gill-nets 
along the beach. 

Stenodus mackenzii (Richardson). Inconnu. Connie. A-sjhi-u'- 
rok, commonly called Shi (shee) by Mackenzie River Es- 
kimos. 

Common in the Mackenzie River, Great Slave Lake, and up the 
Slave River as far as the Grand Rapids at Fort Smith, 60° N. Lat. 
Found in brackish and salt water as far west of the Mackenzie mouth 
as Shingle Point, and occasionally as far west as Herschel Island, 
on the east side of the delta to Toker Point. I have seen specimens 
taken in the mouth of Anderson River, Liverpool Bay. Did not 
observe the species west of Herschel Island or east of Cape Bathurst. 
Large numbers are caught in gill-nets in brackish water at Shingle 
Point, Mackenzie Bay, in July and August, but the flesh is rather 
soft and flabby at that season. Eskimo catch many with barbless 
hooks through the ice on the east mainland side of Richard Island in 
October, November, and December. The Connies are fat and firm 
of flesh at that season. Not many are caught in midwinter, but they 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 453 

bite better again after the sun comes back, later in the winter. The 

average weight here is eight or ten pounds, but I have seen a specimen 

taken at Fort McPherson, Peel River, weighing nearly fifty pounds. 

Salvelinus malma (Walbaum). Salmon Trout. Ek-kal-luk'pik, 

name given by Eskimo from northern Alaska to Coronation 

Gulf. 

Found in most of the larger streams where the water is clear. 

Not so common in salt water, but quite frequently taken at Herschel 

Island, Cape Bathurst, and Langton Bay. Specimens from Herschel 

Island and Hula-hula River, Alaska, identified by Nichols. While 

seining some pools in the Hula-hula River, in the foothills of the Endi- 

cott Mountains, Alaska, together with the common form we caught 

a large number of what may be a dark phase of this variable species, 

or perhaps another species. The common form seen near the coast 

has back dull grayish green, sides pale silvery green, with numerous 

round, pale pink spots, and belly silvery white. The others had 

back very dark olive, almost black, with very faint, small, obscure, 

pinkish spots, some irregular, some comma-shaped, etc. ; sides bright 

olive-green, with brilliant vermilion spots; belly bright vermilion, 

sometimes inclined to crimson, slightly paler along median line, and 

fading to salmon color on breast and throat; pectoral and ventral 

fins with anterior border white. Females were duller colored, belly 

pink or rosy, sometimes with a yellowish tint, and the lower jaws were 

less strongly hooked ; most of the fish were spawning at that time 

(September 11th, 1908), the large yellow eggs being about the size 

of No. 1 shot. These brilliantly colored Trout were seen only in 

the Hula-hula River, and no specimens were brought out, 

Cristivomer namavcush (Walbaum). Lake Trout. Kal-u-ak'piik, 

Mackenzie River Eskimo name for fish brought from the Eskimo 

Lakes. Also called Siii-a-yo'ri-ak by Mackenzie River and 

Baillie Islands people. I-shi-u'mut, Coronation Gulf Eskimo 

name. 

Found in most large inland lakes from Alaska to Coronation Gulf. 

At Great Bear Lake the people claim that they are often taken of 

forty pounds' weight, and occasionally run to sixty pounds. They 

are taken on set-hooks, or by "jigging" through the ice, or in nets. 

One specimen from northern foothills of Endicott Mountains, Alaska, 



454 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

and three specimens from lake at head of Coal Creek, Horton River, 
about forty miles south of Langton Bay, were identified by Nichols. 
Thymallus signifer (Richardson). Arctic Grayling. Su-luk-pau'- 
rak (Alaskan Eskimo), or Su-luk-pau'yak (Mackenzie River 
Eskimo). 

Observed the Grayling in the Hula-hula and Chandlar rivers, 
Alaska, in the Horton River and its tributaries, and in the 
Dease River. It was not observed in the delta of the Mackenzie 
River, as the water seems to be too turbid, but caught one and saw 
several in the Mackenzie at Fort Providence, where the river water is 
quite clear. The Grayling is commonly called Bluefish on the Mac- 
kenzie. 
Osmereus dentex Steindachner. Arctic Smelt. 

Very rarely taken along the Arctic coast. One specimen, taken 
at Cape Bathurst, was identified by Nichols, who says : " The 
smelt is Osmereus dentex, as it agrees pretty well with the type 
description of that species, and perfectly with specimens from 
Vladivostock, which is not far from the type locality. It is quite 
unlike the description of that fish from Alaska, but probably those 
descriptions are inaccurate. At any rate, it is the Alaskan fish, not 
our specimen, which may be difl^erent." 

Esox luciiis Linnseus. Pike. Jackfish. Shi-u'lik, name given by 
Eskimo from northern Alaska to Cape Bathurst. 

Found abundantly in the Mackenzie delta and other rivers, 
also in lakes as far east as Coronation Gulf. Specimens from lake 
near Horton River, south of Langton Bay, identified by Nichols. 
Platichthys stellatus (Pallas). Starry Flounder. 

Small Flounders were occasionally taken in our nets at Langton 
Bay only, and we did not find them very common. Specimens iden- 
tified by Nichols. 

Microgadus proxivius (Girard). Tomcod. O'gak (pi. O'kat), by 
Eskimo as far east as Coronation Gulf. 

At Toker Point, on the east side of the mouth of the Macken- 
zie River, the species is apparently rare. Locally common in 
Liverpool Bay. Tomcod are very abundant in certain spots near 
the eastern end of Langton Bay, and are very easily hooked through 
the ice all winter with almost any kind of hook. In Coronation 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 455 

Gulf they are common in certain localities. The Copper Eskimo 
catch them with a very large, barbless, gaff-like hook which is 
"jigged" up and down. On the shank of the hook, two or three 
inches above the point, small bangles of white bone are suspended. 
When the fish come to nibble at these swinging bangles, the hook is 
jerked sharply up, usually catching the fish in the throat. A species 
of Rock Cod, growing to eighteen inches in length, is occasionally 
caught in the Tomcod fishing place at Langton Bay, and is called 
U-gaVik. The Rock Cod was not observed elsewhere. 
Coitus punctulattis (Gill). Blob. Miller's Thumb. 

One specimen, taken in the upper portion of the Chandlar 
River, Endicott Mountains, Alaska, February 23d, 1909, was iden- 
tified by Nichols. 
OncocoUus hexacornis (Richardson). Six-horned Bullhead. 

This Sculpin was described from specimens collected at the 
mouth of Tree River near the Coppermine. Sculpins or "Bull- 
heads" are found almost everywhere along the Arctic coast, but 
are only occasionally eaten by the Eskimo, at times when other fish 
are scarce. They are quite common as far up the Mackenzie delta 
as Kittigaryuit, but I did not notice any farther up the river. 
They are frequently taken on hooks while fishing in salt water for 
Tomcod and other fish. The common, universally distributed spe- 
cies is dull drab-colored, paler below. In Langton Bay we occa- 
sionally caught another species, averaging a little larger, and 
lighter colored, mottled with yellowish. Ka-nai'yuk is the 
Eskimo name for the Sculpin from northern Alaska to Coronation 
Gulf. 

Lota maculosa (Le Soeur). Ling. Loche. Known as Ti-tal'- 
lirk by the Eskimo from northern Alaska to Cape Bathurst. 

It is probably the favorite food fish of all these Eskimo, and is 
universally distributed in fresh and brackish waters, but seems 
nowhere to be taken in very large numbers. The very large, fatty 
liver is considered the best portion for food. It is caught both in 
gill-nets and on set-hooks on the bottom. Specimen from Horton 
River, about thirty-five miles south of Langton Bay, was identified 
by Nichols. 



456 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

BIRDS 

(7) Gavia immer (Briinnich). Loon. Tuh'lik. 

The Common Loon or Great Northern Diver occasionally straggles 
to the Arctic coast, both in Alaska and Canada. It closely resembles 
the Yellow-billed Loon, which is pretty generally distributed, but 
the Common Loon is smaller in size and is easily recognized by the 
black bill. I saw one specimen swimming in mouth of Kogaryuak 
River, Coronation Gulf, eighteen miles east of the mouth of the 
Coppermine, June 26th, 19n. Captain Fritz Wolki showed me the 
head of one killed at mouth of Horton River, on the west side of 
Franklin Bay, the only one seen during several years' hunting in 
that region. One was seen near Langton Bay in 1910. Mr. E. de K. 
Leffingwell informed me that a black-billed Tuh-lik was killed near 
Flaxman Island, Alaska, the first specimen that the Eskimo there 
had ever seen. 

(8) Gavia ddamsi (Gray). Yellow-billed Loon. Tuh'lik. 

The Yellow-billed Loon is found in most places on the Arctic 
coast in summer, from northwestern Alaska to Coronation Gulf, 
but does not seem to be very common anywhere. Its note is a wild 
piercing whistle, quite unlike the note of either the Pacific or Red- 
throated Loons, and its light horn-colored or whitish bill can be 
recognized almost as far as the bird can be seen. The species is 
well known to the Eskimo, who formerly used the head and bill as 
an ornament on ceremonial dresses and dance-caps. I have never 
been able to find a nest of this bird or hear of any white man or 
native in the North who had ever done so. 

(9) Gavia arctica (Linnseus). Black-throated Loon. 

All specimens of Black-throated Loon in my collection (from 
northern Alaska, Mackenzie delta, Franklin Bay, and Coronation 
Gulf) were referred to the Pacific species, after consultation and 
comparison by Dr. Louis P. Bishop, Dr. Jonathan Dwight, Jr., and 
Mr. A. C. Bent. Dr. Bishop states that he has specimens of true 
arctica from Franklin Bay. 

(10) Gavia pacifica (Lawrence). Pacific Loon. Mal-le-re' 
(Alaskan Eskimo). Ivak'tjauk kak-hlu'lik. Hooded Loon 
(Mackenzie Eskimo). 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 457 

Fairly common in most Arctic localities as far east as Coronation 
Gulf. My specimens from Coronation Gulf show a slight tendency 
towards an intermediate relation with G. arctica, but the pacifica 
characters seem to be more marked. Dr. Louis P. Bishop gives as 
the most valuable diagnostic mark that G. pacifica has much wider 
white barrings on the back than G. artica. Found nests with fresh 
eggs on July 5th, 1911, on south side of Coronation Gulf, and on June 
22d and 28th, 1912, near Cape Bathurst. All nests on little semi- 
floating islands in shallow marshes. The Eskimo consider all Loons 
good game-birds, and I should call them as good eating as the aver- 
age sea ducks. In the spring migration of 1910, on the east side of 
the Mackenzie delta, large numbers were shot by the natives as they 
passed over, singly and in pairs, flying straight northeast along the 
coast with rapid, regular flight. They usually rise from the water 
by flapping and splashing along the surface for some distance. 
(11) Gavia stellata (Pontoppidan) . Red-throated Loon. Kak- 
tjauk or Kak-sauk. Sometimes Kak-tjauk-pi-a'luk, "the 
ordinary Loon," to distinguish from pacifica (Mackenzie Es- 
kimo). 
Common everj'where along the Arctic coast ; in most places 
more abundant than the Pacific Loon. On the wing its flight is 
rapid and regular, and I have seen the bird fly up directly from the 
water like a duck. On account of its prevalence and its large reper- 
toire of loud, weird, and startling notes, which are heard at all hours 
of the twenty-four, the Red-throated Loon is in many ways the most 
notable summer bird of the Arctic. Sometimes a shrill staccato 
shriek, at other times like the distant wailing or moaning of a child, 
any uncanny or unaccountable noise can usually be correctly attrib- 
uted to a Kak-sauk. 

Like the Pacific Loon, the Red-throated Loon begins nesting a 
little later than most of the Arctic birds. Near the mouth of the 
Colville River, northern Alaska, I took one set of two slightly in- 
cubated eggs July 4th, 1909, on wet, boggy ground at brink of a pond. 
Another more advanced in incubation on July 13th, on a little flat- 
topped peat island about eight inches above water level. On south 
side of Coronation Gulf fresh eggs were taken on June 28th and July 
11th, 1911, and downy young on the Duke of York Islands July 21st. 



458 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Near Cape Bathurst fresh eggs were taken on June 22d and 28th, 1912. 
Near Kay Point, Yukon Territory, we shot two juvenal specimens 
which were full-grown, although the sterna were entirely cartilagi- 
nous and the coracoids nearly so. 
(31 a) Uria lomvia ana (Pallas). Pallas's Murre. 

One specimen was taken at Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, 
and preserved by the late Sergeant J. A. E. Selig, of the Royal North- 
west Mounted Police, in 1909 or 1910, and later presented to me. 
I did not observe any other examples of this species, or in fact any 
other birds which could be identified as belonging to the Auk, Murre, 
or Puffin group anywhere east of Flaxman Island, Alaska. 

(36) Stercorarius pomarinus (Temminck). Pomarine Jaeger. 
I-shung-ok. Ki-pi-yok-tel'lik (Baillie Islands). 

Rather more local in distribution than the two other species of 
Jaegers. I did not see any west of the Mackenzie or east of Cape 
Parry. Large numbers were seen on the east side of the Mackenzie 
early in June, flying to northeast, in company with the other species, 
usually in twos or threes. On the west side of Franklin Bay this 
species is most abundant. Its habits and flight are quite hawk-like, 
but it is a little more sluggish than either the Parasitic or Long-tailed 
species. It is readily distinguished from the others by the rudder- 
like middle tail feathers. The dusky phase is much less common 
than the white phase, about one to one hundred in the Franklin 
Bay region. The dusky phase of the Long-tailed Jaeger is much 
more frequent. One set of two eggs was taken on Baillie Islands 
July 3d, 1912, the nest consisting merely of a few leaves and bits of 
grass lining a little hollow in a small turf elevation in a wide flat of 
soft, wet tundra. 

(37) Stercorarius parasiticus (Linnaeus). Parasitic Jaeger. I- 
shung'ok. 

Fairly common and generally distributed. The Jaegers are the 
terror of the smaller birds, spending their time ceaselessly hawking 
back and forth over the tundra looking for eggs and young birds. 
Large numbers of eggs of Eiders and Gulls are destroyed in the 
rookeries by the Jaegers. Wlierever the Arctic Terns are nesting, 
their neighbors are comparatively safe, as the belligerent little Terns 
speedily cause any marauding Jaeger to beat a hasty retreat. I 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 459 

have also seen Ruddy Turnstones drive a Jaeger away from their 
nests. I once observed a pair of Jaegers chasing a flock of Sand- 
pipers. One Sandpiper flew out of the flock, the Jaegers in pursuit. 
They seemed to work together, one darting in while the other turned. 
The Sandpiper finally escaped by flying upward until almost out of 
sight, and the Jaegers finally gave up the chase. Found a nest and 
two eggs near Colville delta June 24th, 1909, on the tip of a little 
peninsula projecting into a small pond about half a mile from the 
coast. The female present was of the white, the male of the dark, 
phase. Some other birds will also attack the Jaegers, which are 
really cov/ardly birds when heartily opposed. I have on two or three 
occasions seen a Rock Ptarmigan fly fiercely at a Jaeger which came 
too near his nesting place, and put the Jaeger to ignominious flight. 

(38) Stercorarius longicaud/us Vieillot. Long-tailed Jaeger. 
I-shung-ok. 

Generally distributed and probably the most common species 
in most localities. Habits identical with those of the Parasitic 
Jaeger, and the two species are rather hard to distinguish from each 
other in life. Nest usually a little depression in moss on upland 
tundra not far from the sea-coast. When the nest is approached, 
the parent birds usually make a great deal of fuss, screaming and 
darting down at the intruder's head. 

(39) Pagophila alba (Gunnerus). Ivory Gull. 

Three Ivory Gulls were seen and one female shot by Stefans- 
son, October 7th, 1908, about fifteen miles east of Beachy Point, the 
eastern edge of the Colville River delta, northern Alaska. This 
species was not positively identified on any other occasion by mem- 
bers of our party. 

(42) Larus hyperboreus Gunnerus. Glaucous Gull. Nau'yak 
(gull). Nau-ya-vuk (big gull). 

Fairly common in most localities on Arctic coast, nesting singly 
or in small colonies either on tops of rocky islands or ledges of sea 
cliffs or on smafl low islands in tundra lakes. Wandering gulls 
usually appear along the Arctic coast early in May, become fairly 
common by the end of May, and remain until October. All the 
gulls are considered game-birds by the Eskimo, and when young 
(in the gray or dusky plumage) are not bad eating. 



460 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

(44) Lams glaucescens Naumann. Glaucous-winged GulL 
Nau'yak. 

Common at various points along the Arctic coast, but in life is 
difficult to distinguish from other closely related species. Speci- 
mens from Barter Island, Alaska, and Langton Bay were preserved. 
At Langton Bay in September large numbers of this species (mostly 
Juvenal) were seen in company with L. hyperhoreus, feeding on car- 
cass of a stranded whale. 
(51) Larus argentatus Pontoppidan. Herring Gull. 

Common on Great Slave Lake. One female specimen taken at 
mouth of Kogaryuak River, Coronation Gulf, June 10th, 1911. 

(53) Larus californicus Lawrence. California Gull. Nau'yak. 
Common species in Coronation Gulf. Male specimen taken at 

mouth of Kogaryuak River, June 10th, 1911. Numbers nesting with 
Glaucous Gulls on shelves of rock on Duke of York Archipelago, 
Coronation Gulf, and near Poi^t Williams, Victoria Island. Prob- 
ably equally abundant farther west, but the species was not distin- 
guished from the other species and no specimens preserved. 

(54) Larus delaioarensis Ord. Ring-billed Gull. 

Common on Athabaska Lake. A few nesting on small, rocky 
islands in the Grand Rapids of Slave River. Not seen on the Arctic 
coast. 

(55) Larus brachyrhynchus Richardson. Short-billed Gull, Nau- 
ya-vat'ku-tju-a'lik (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Fairly common in Mackenzie delta. Our specimen taken on 
mainland east of Richard Island, June 7th, 1910. 

(61) Rhodostethia rosea (Macgillivray). Ross's Gull. * 

This species was not observed on any of our journeys. Whalers 
say that the species occasionally is seen in some numbers near Point 
Barrow in the fall, and that often large numbers used to come around 
the ships while cutting in Bow-head Whales in the vicinity of Herald 
Island and Wrangell Land late in the fall. 

(62) Xema sahini (J. Sabine). Sabine's Gull. Ka-ri-ga'gu-ak 
■^ (western Eskimo). Ik-keg-ga'gi-ak (Baillie Islands Eskimo). 

Observed in small numbers during the breeding season from the 
Colville delta, Alaska, east to Coronation Gulf. Downy young 
were captured in Austin Bay, southern Victoria Island, July 23d, 1911. 



Male Willow Ptarmigan in Early Plumage, Dease River, May, 1911. R. M. A. 




Female Rock Ptarmigan, 
Coronation Gulf. 



Nest of Rock Ptarmigan, near Frank- 
lin Bay, June 17, 1911. R. M. A. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 461 

Large numbers were found nesting on the edges of a large, marshy 
lake near Cape Bathurst, Franklin Bay, on June 22d and 28th, 1912. 
The nests were usually on a little low, wet, boggy peninsula projecting 
out into the water, but sometimes on flat, boggy ground over one 
hundred yards from water. The Gulls were often seen sitting on 
eggs, but flew up when a person came within thirty yards or more, 
circling about overhead screaming tsu-tsu-tsu-u (very rapidly and 
shrilly). They feed by walking over wet, boggy ground or over 
tide flats, picking up bits, or by swimming in shoal water and picking 
up minute particles from the surface in the manner of Phalaropes. 

(70) Sterna hirundo Linnaeus. Common Tern. 

Numbers nesting in delta of Slave River, Mackenzie Territory, 
on low sand and mud-bar islands. I did not take any specimens on 
the Arctic coast, but Captain Joseph F. Bernard showed me several 
specimens of eggs which he had taken, with parent birds, on Jags 
River sandspit, near Barter Island, Alaska, July 7th, 1910. A small 
colony were nesting here, near to a larger colony of Arctic Terns. 

(71) Sterna paradiscsa Briinnich. Arctic Tern. I-mit-ko- 
tai'lak. 

Nesting commonly in colonies all along the Arctic coast on sand- 
spits and bars, or on islands in rivers and lakes near the coast. Nests 
are sometimes placed within two or three feet of a Black Brant's or 
Eider Duck's nest. This is an advantageous arrangement, as the 
pugnacious little Terns effectually keep off any predatory gulls or 
Jaegers which are always on the lookout for eggs of other birds. 
The Eiders suffer severely when nesting alone, but when Terns occupy 
the same rookery, the Ducks usually hatch their eggs unless dis- 
turbed by man or large animals. 
(125) Pelecanus erythrorhynchos Gmelin. White Pelican. 

In 1908 (June 9th), visited a rookery on a small, timbered island in 
the Grand Rapids of the Slave River 60° N. Lat., which contained 
ninety-seven nests, some with eggs and some with young birds, on 
an area of perhaps fifty feet in diameter. The Indian who accom- 
panied me said that the Pelicans formerly nested on a small, barren 
rock about two hundred yards above the present rookery, but had 
moved to the larger island two years before. This is probably the 
most northerly nesting place of this species, which is unknown to 



462 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

the natives of the Mackenzie delta. Captain F. Wolki, who had a 
little trading station at the mouth of Horton River, on the west side 
of Franklin Bay, about 1903-1907, states that he saw White Pelican 
killed near the mouth of Anderson River at the southern end of 
Liverpool Bay, the only specimen the natives had ever seen. 

(129) Mergus americanus Cassin. Merganser. 

Observed on the Athabaska River, but not near the Arctic coast. 

(130) Mergus senator Linnseus. Red-breasted Merganser. 
Pai (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimos). 

Fairly common in the Mackenzie delta in the deep, narrow creeks, 
grown up to the dense willow thickets. Occasional on the Arctic 
coast of Alaska. Shot five in the mouth of the Hula-hula River, 
September 5th, 1908. At that time the wing quills were nearly grown, 
but the ducks either could not or would not fly, and tried to escape 
by diving. 
(132) Anas platyrhynchos Linnaeus. Mallard. 

I did not see any Mallards farther north than the lower part of 
Slave River, but Mr. H. W. Jones informed me that the species was 
found at Hay River at the western end of Great Slave Lake. His 
first 1908 record was May 1st, and he took a set of ten eggs May 28th, 
with incubation advanced. 
(137) Mareca americana (Gmelin). Baldpate. 

Observed this species in the Slave River delta June 21st, 1908. 
Mr. H. W. Jones reported it at Hay River, and Captain F. Wolki 
informed me that he had taken specimens once or twice at the mouth 
of Horton River on Franklin Bay. 

(139) Nettion carolineme (Gmelin). Green-winged Teal. Sha- 
vi-li-ra'luk (Mackenzie Eskimo). (Named from metallic 
luster on speculum.) 

Found one nest in delta of Slave River June 23d, 1908, hidden in 
dead grass on a small hummock at roots of a clump of willows. 
Rather rare in Mackenzie delta, but several specimens taken on 
mainland east of Richard Island in June, 1910. 
(142) Spatula clypeata (Linnseus). Shoveler. 

Nesting in the Slave River delta in some numbers. A few seen 
in the Mackenzie delta in June. Captain F. Wolki says that he 
shot six Shovelers at the mouth of Horton River several years ago. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 463 

(143) Dafila acuta (Linnaeus). Pintail. Ku'm-ak (Alaskan Es- 
kimo). Iv'u-rak (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Rather common in fresh-water ponds along the Arctic coast of 
Alaska and Canada as far east as Coronation Gulf. In the Mackenzie 
delta the Pintail begins to nest early in June. At Cape Bathurst, 
on the 28th of June, 1912, female Pintails had shed quills and were 
unable to fly, while the males were flying around in flocks. 
(146) Marila americana (Eyton). Redhead. 

Did not observe this species, but Mr. H. W. Jones informs me 
that it occurs at Hay River, where he noted the first spring arrival 
May 17th, 1908. 

(148) Marila marila (Linnaeus). Scaup Duck. Kak-hlu-tok' 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

June 9th, 1910. Shot a female Scaup from a bunch of four which 
flew over our blind on east side of Mackenzie delta, opposite Richard 
Island. The Eskimo here do not distinguish between this species 
and the Lesser Scaup. 

(149) Marila affinis (Eyton). Lesser Scaup Duck. Kak-hlu- 
tak' (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Fairly common throughout the Mackenzie delta. July 22d, 1908, 
saw a flock in a reedy pond on a large island and killed three. Two 
had the primaries shed and one had wing and tail feathers still in 
place. Occasional specimens taken near Langton Bay and on south 
side of Coronation Gulf. 
(151) Clangula dangula americana (Bonaparte). Golden-eye. 

Common on the Athabaska, Slave, and upper Mackenzie rivers ; 
known almost universally as "Wood Duck" in this region. The 
only Arctic occurrence which I have noted is of a few seen on the 
east branch of the Mackenzie delta, June 24th, 1910. These birds 
may have been Barrow's Golden-eye Clangula islandica (Gmelin). 

(153) Charitonetta albeola (Linnaeus). Buffle-head. 
Observed on the Athabaska River in May, 1908. 

(154) Harelda hyemalis (Linnaeus). Old-squaw. A-har^lik. 
A-ha'lirx (Alaskan Eskimo). Ma-li-ra'luk (Mackenzie Es- 
kimo) . 

The commonest duck found in the Arctic — everywhere along 
the coast and in fresh-water ponds and lakes. During the whole 



464 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

summer its " A-ha-ha'lik " call is almost as prevalent and character- 
istic as the wailing of the Red-throated and Pacific Loons. The 
nesting is rather late, at the end of June or early part of July. The 
nests are usually built on small islands or on the edge of a pond or 
lake, a little hollow in a clump of grass, lined with a mass of black 
down. In July and August, when the quills have been molted and 
the ducks are unable to fly, thousands are sometimes seen congregated 
in bays and large lakes, and when pursued, dive with great expertness. 
The Old-squaws often remain until October or November around 
some ice-hole or lead of open water. 
(155) Histrionicus histrionicus (Linnaeus). Harlequin Duck. 

I never observed this species in the Arctic. Mr. H. W. Jones 
reported the first arrival at Hay River, May 16th, 1908. 

(157) Polystida steUeri (Pallas). Steller's Eider. Ig-nak-i'ri 
— fire bird (Alaskan Eskimo) . 

One male specimen of this beautiful species was taken just west 
of the Colville River delta June 18th, 1909. Two females in fall 
plumage were taken at west end of Barter Island sandspit, Alaska, 
on August 28th and 31st, 1908 This is the most eastern point at 
which I have seen this species, but Captain F. Wolki told me (in 1912) 
that several years before he had shot one at Cape Bathurst. Steller's 
Eider is apparently only a very rare straggler east of the Alaskan 
boundary. 

(158) Ardonetta fischeri (Brandt). Spectacled Eider. Kring- 
a'lik (western Eskimo). 

This species was fairly common in fresh-water ponds west of the 
Colville River delta in June and also in the delta in July. Females 
killed June 12th had eggs in ovary about the size of a Robin's egg. 
On July 4th our dogs flushed a duck apparently of this species from a 
nest containing eight fresh eggs, on the ground in a little patch of 
scrub willows about one foot high, ten yards from river bank. On 
July 7th, while drifting down the river, the dogs flushed a Spectacled 
Eider from the willow brush, and, from the wrangling which ensued, 
I think they found a nest with eggs. 

Several Spectacled Eiders were shot while drifting down through 
the Colville delta. 
(161) Somateria v-nigra (Gray). Pacific Eider. $ A-mau'lik 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 465 

(Mackenzie and Baillie Islands Eskimo.) 9 Mi'tirk or 
Ar-naViak. 
Common everywhere along the Arctic coast during the eastward 
spring migration and westward fall migration. Breeds locally in 
large colonies on sandspits and islands along the coast, notably in 
Kuparuk and Jags river sandspits, Alaska; Cape Brown, Horton 
River sandspit, and in small numbers as far east as Simpson Bay, 
Victoria Island, where I found a nest containing eggs July 26th, 1911. 
The males begin to migrate west along the coast in large flocks shortly 
after the eggs are laid. At Cape Bathurst, in the summer of 1912, 
large flocks of male Eiders were going west nearly every day during 
July. From the 1st to the 18th of July the male King Eiders 
were largely in the majority, and after that date the Pacific Eiders 
were more numerous. Females and young migrate later, some 
remaining on open water until late in October. 
(162) Somateria spedabilis (Linnaeus). King Eider. Kau-rik 
or Kau'-fe-vik (Alaskan Eskimo). S Tu-ti-ri-a'lik. ? Mi- 
tirk or Ag-naVi-ak (Mackenzie and Baillie Islands Es- 
kimo). 
Common everywhere along the coast during migration, and breeds 
locally in colonies on sandspits and islands as well as here and there 
near fresh-water ponds near the coast. Males migrate westward 
before the females. At Cape Bathurst in 1912 they began going 
west about June 30th, following a very regular course usually, but 
sometimes in V-shaped flocks like geese. On the morning of July 11th 
for about three hours a large flock would pass every few minutes, and 
sometimes four or five flocks were in sight at once. They were mostly 
King Eiders, about one flock of Pacific Eiders to ten of King Eiders. 
The Pacific Eiders were still quite fat at this time, but the bill was 
getting soft, flabby, and faded in color. By the 18th of July as many 
Pacific Eiders as King Eiders were flying, and occasionally a King 
Eider was taken with head finely streaked with brown. 
(165) Oidemia deglandi Bonaparte. White-winged Scoter. Turn- 
ra'vik (Mackenzie Eskimo). 
Fairly common in the Mackenzie River delta. East of Richard 
Island the first appeared June 2d, 1910. Several flocks, all males, 
passed north about 2 : 00 a.m. on June 17th. On the evening of the 
2h 



466 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

20th, several flocks passed, going north, and the same day one of the 
Eskimo killed a female with a hard-shelled egg in the oviduct. 
Did not notice this species far to the east or west side of Mackenzie 
delta. Both the White-winged and Surf Scoters are called Turn- 
raVik by the natives of the Mackenzie delta. This is unusual, as 
species of much less apparent resemblance are usually distinguished 
from each other. 

(166) Oidemia perspicillata ^(Linnseus). Surf Scoter. A-vi- 
luk'tjak (western Eskimo). Turn-ra'vik (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Rather common in the Mackenzie delta, but less so than the White- 
winged Scoter. At Herschel Island in August, hundreds of molting 
Scoters and Old-squaws frequented the large bay on the south side of 
the island. Most of them appeared unable to fly, and immediately 
swim out to sea or try to escape by diving when any one approaches. 
(169) Chen hyperboreus hyperboreus (Pallas). Snow Goose. Ka- 
ngok' (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Nests in small numbers at various points along the north Alaskan 
coast, in large numbers on Richard Island in the Mackenzie delta, 
and to some extent on the Cape Bathurst peninsula. Large numbers 
pass northeastward through the east branch of the Mackenzie delta, 
but only a few remain to nest on the mainland in this region. Cap- 
tain F. Wolki, who lived at the mouth of Horton River for several 
years, told me that when the winter's snowfall was light and conse- 
quently melted away quickly, there was very little goose-shooting in 
the spring. If there is little snow on the ground when the geese arrive, 
they stay only three or four days and head out seaward to the north- 
east, apparently to Banks Land. If the ground is snow-covered, the 
large flocks sometimes stay for a long time, moving back and forth 
in the direction of Harrowby Bay and the Anderson River. The 
greatest migration route east of the Mackenzie seems to be down 
the Anderson River and along the east side of Liverpool Bay. Very 
few pass around Cape Bathurst, although formerly a few pairs nested 
on Baillie Islands. The main flight passes over Harrowby Bay (the 
eastern arm of Liverpool Bay) and either scatter cut to nest on the 
tundra flats behind the Smoking Mountains or cross over to Banks 
Land. Very few pass Langton Bay in spring, and only occasional 
stragglers were seen in Coronation Gulf. In 1912 we took the first 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 467 

sets of fresh eggs on the Bathurst peninsula June 8th ; nest on a little 
dry, grassy ridge between two ditches on a flat valley intersected by 
a network of small, shallow ditches about half a mile from a large 
ice-bound lake. The Eskimo often call up passing flocks by imi- 
tating their call Ka-ngok' ! Ka-ngok' ! 

On the northwest side of Richard Island, before the gun and 
rifle days, the Eskimo used to kill thousands of Snow Geese in July 
and August when the birds were molting and unable to fly, large 
quantities of goose breasts being dried and stored away for winter 
use. At the present time few people ever visit this part of the 
Mackenzie delta, and there are no permanent residents. The few 
Eskimos remaining in the Mackenzie delta, however, live almost 
entirely on geese — about equal numbers of White-fronted, Hutchins's 
and Snow Geese and the Black Brant — for about three weeks in 
May and June, but as the natives nowadays find it necessary to make 
long boat voyages to Fort McPherson and Herschel Island to trade 
they seldom have time to visit the large rookeries in season. In 
the vicinity of Cape Halkett, Alaska, is also a famous hunting ground 
for killing molting Snow Geese, but it is seldom visited, except by 
an occasional traveling party of Eskimo. 
(169, 1) Chen ccerulescens (Linnaeus). Blue Goose. 

This species was not observed at all by our party. At Lake 
Athabaska, one of the greatest goose-shooting points in the North, 
large numbers of geese are killed and stored away for winter. Mr. 
Peter Loutit, Dominion Forest Ranger, told me that he killed one 
Blue Wavey, the first one he had ever seen, in the fall of 1907. Loutit 
and his father killed about 1200 geese, mostly "White Wavies" 
(Snow Geese) and "Gray Wavies" (White-fronted Geese) at Lake 
Athabaska that season. 
(170) Chen rossi (Cassin). Ross's Goose. 

Small numbers were seen on the lower Athabaska River in the 
latter part of May, 1908. At the western end of Lake Athabaska, 
Ross's Goose migrates late, after the bulk of the Snow Geese and 
White-fronted geese have gone north. They come in large numbers 
and are easily killed. Owing to their stupid habits, the birds have 
received the common name of "Galoots" in the Athabaska region. 
Numerous inquiries among the Eskimo of northern Alaska and the 



468 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Mackenzie River delta brought out the fact that no natives of the 
region west of Cape Bathurst had ever seen or knew of any name 
for a goose smaller than the Snow Goose. One was killed about 
fifteen miles east of Cape Bathurst in June, 1912, and Captain Wolki 
told me that some seasons he had killed a number at the mouth of 
Horton River. None were observed during the spring and summer 
which I spent on Coronation Gulf. 

(171 a) Anser alhifrons gambeli Hartlaub. White-fronted Goose. 
Ki'ri-yuk. Lirk'le-vik (Alaskan Eskimo). Ting'mi-ak (Mac- 
kenzie River and Coronation Gulf). 

In the Mackenzie region Tingmiat is the ordinary term for 
geese in general. Common in summer all along the Arctic coast and 
nesting in suitable localities. A nest found on an island in the Col- 
ville delta, Alaska, had four young goslings just hatched, — July 
10th, 1909 ; color olive-greenish on back and crown, under parts and 
neck bright greenish yellow. The nest was on a little mound of dry 
earth (Spermophile's burrow) a foot or two higher than the surround- 
ing land and about forty yards from the river. A nest with four 
slightly incubated eggs taken June 16th, 1911, on the south side of 
Coronation Gulf, was placed on a little peninsula at side of a small, 
fresh-water lake. The Eskimos can usually attract the attention of 
passing White-fronted Geese by imitating their note "Lirk-a-lik- 
lik-lik," and very often a goose or a flock wheels about to investigate 
and circles over the hunter. This species is usually fatter than the 
other geese (except the Black Brant) when arriving at the mouth of 
the Mackenzie in the spring, and accordingly is prized most. 
(172) Branta canadensis canadensis (Linnaeus). Canada Goose. 

Fairly common as far north as Great Slave Lake, but replaced on 
the Arctic coast hy B. c. hutchinsi. 

(172 a) Branta canadensis hutchinsi (Richardson). Hutchins's 
Goose. Ex-rau-tel'lik (Alaskan Eskimo). U-lu-a-ro'lik (Mac- 
kenzie Eskimo). 

Fairly common in most localities on the Arctic coast, nesting from 
the Colville River, Alaska, east to Coronation Gulf. A set of five 
slightly incubated eggs was taken June 30th, 1909, on a little island of 
peat, about six feet in diameter, top about one foot above water 
level — fifteen yards from mainland. A pair with four young were 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 469 

seen in the east branch of Mackenzie delta June 24th, 1910. One 
young gosling which we caught was covered with dark yellow down 
with a greenish cast — bill and feet black. The season was about 
a month further advanced here than it was fifty miles farther north 
(beyond the tree line). East of Richard Island the Black Brant and 
Longspurs had just begun to lay, about June 16th. Around Corona- 
tion Gulf a few Hutchins's Geese were seen during the spring and 
smnmer of 1911, but no nests were found. 
(174) Branta nigrican^s (Lawrence). Black Brant. Nig'lirk-nak 

(Alaskan Eskimo). Nig-lir-na'luk (Mackenzie Eskimo). 
Common all along the Arctic coast, migrating east and west, 
breeding as far east as Coronation Gulf. Nests usually on small, 
flat islands in shallow tundra lakes not far from the coast, but often 
are found on the edges of lakes or on the ground in wet, marshy places. 
Nests commonly on tundra in northern Alaska, very abundantly on 
the low land east of the Mackenzie delta and on the Cape Bathurst 
peninsula. Less common farther east. The most eastern locality 
where I observed the species was on the Duke of York Archipelago 
in Coronation Gulf, where four adults and six young with light gray 
downy plumage were seen and all captured July 21st, 1911. The 
adults were molting quills and seemed able to fly only a few yards. 
Nests are usually composed of a few grasses and a large mass of 
thickly matted down pellets. When sitting on eggs, the female 
Brant often stretches her head and neck out, extending flat on the 
ground. 
(180) Olor columhianus (Ord.). Whistling Swan. Kog'ruk 

(Alaskan Eskimo). Kog'yuk, -yok (2), -yu-it (3) (Mackenzie 

Eskimo) . 
Occurs in summer in suitable localities from northern Alaska 
to Coronation Gulf. Found one nest in the Colville delta, Alaska, 
June 25th, 1909, with five eggs, slightly incubated. Saw the Swan 
with field-glasses sitting on her nest on edge of a lake over a mile 
away, and after encircling an almost interminable labyrinth of con- 
nected lakes and ponds, finally got out to the nest on a narrow little 
peninsula. The nest was about ten feet from the water of the lake, 
and the base about four feet above water level. The lake was filled 
with solid ice, except 10-30 yards around the edge. Base of nest 



470 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

about seven feet across ; about eighteen inches high and twenty-four 
inches across depression at top. The bulk of nest was composed 
of small blocks and chunks of moss, evidently broken up piecemeal 
by the Swans into bits about one and one half or two inches square 
and partially dried. On top of this foundation was laid a thick 
circular mass of grass and weed-stalks, mixed with a few feathers 
and white down. A considerable amount of down and feathers was 
lodged on grass stalks for fifteen to twenty feet to leeward of the 
nest. The Swan left her nest when I was about two hundred yards 
away, and was soon joined by her mate. The pair kept at about 
three hundred yards' distance all the time I was near the nest, feeding 
apparently unconcerned. Several nests were said to have been found 
near Camden Bay, Alaska, the same season, late in June and early 
in July. Most of the nests were on small islands in tundra lakes 
and could not be reached without using a kayak. Swans are fairly 
common on east side of the Mackenzie delta, but the most abundant 
nesting locality is probably on the lake-covered flat lands between 
Langton Bay and Darnley Bay. .In the fall nearly every little lake 
in the Langton Bay region has a pair or brood of young Swans. 
Flying Swans are very often called back by Eskimo imitating their 
resonant call note. Sometimes the Swans will come very near to 
investigate. 
(190) Boiaurus lentiginosus (Montagu). Bittern. 

One seen in Slave River delta, near Fort Resolution, June 20th, 
1908. Mr. Harry W. Jones informed me that the American Bittern 
is often seen at Hay River, and he has observed it on the Mackenzie 
as far north as the mouth of Willow River. 

(204) Grus americana (Linnaeus). Whooping Crane. 

I did not observe the species in the North. Mr. H. W. Jones 
reported the first 1908 arrival at Hay River (Great Slave Lake) on 
May 12th ; three or four bands of five or six each being seen. Es- 
kimo who are familiar with the whole Mackenzie delta up to Arctic 
River and Fort McPherson on Peel River, all say they have never 
seen a White Crane. 

(205) Grus canadeii^is (Linnsens) . Little Brown Crane. Ta-ti'gi-ak 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Several pairs apparently nesting near Fort Resolution; species 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 471 

is fairly common on the large flat delta islands of the west branch of 
the Mackenzie River, from the last trees north to Tent Island. Less 
common on east side of the delta and very rare on the Cape Bathurst 
Peninsula. One seen in the Colville delta, Alaska, July 4th, 1909, 
apparently nesting. Specimens killed at Kanian-nik, east of Richard 
Island on May 29th, 1910, were fat and had the whole alimentary 
canal stained purple with the juice of crowberries. The first arrival 
here was on May 11th, 1910. 
(214) Porzana Carolina (Linnaeus). Sora. 

Shot one male specimen in the Slave River delta, June 18th, 1908. 
H. W. Jones reports the first 1908 arrival at Hay River June 18th, 
and a male shot June 22d. Not observed north of Great Slave 
Lake. 

(222) Phalaropus fulicarius (Linnseus). Red Phalarope. I-ma-ri'- 
a-fiik (Alaskan Eskimo). Kai-yat-fo-yok'pok (Mackenzie 
Eskimo). 

Generally distributed in summer from northern Alaska to Vic- 
toria Island, and locally common. In the Colville delta, northern 
Alaska, found a number of nests between the 20th of June and 10th of 
July ; slight hollows in the ground in little clumps of grass, usually 
on wet, sloppy tundra near water. The male parent attends to the 
incubation. The Phalaropes feed principally by wading in shallow 
ponds. When feeding in deeper water, they have a habit of whirling 
around and around as if on a pivot. Later in summer they assemble 
in flocks and keep to the coast, remaining until September. When 
feeding at sea, they swim about, continually bobbing the head, and 
often picking up some tiny floating morsel with a motion so quick 
as to be diflBcult to detect. They are very adept at riding breakers, 
sailing over head-on, or skipping lightly over a curler. The red 
breast plumage is changed for the whitish fall coat by the middle of 
August. 

(223) Lohipes lobatus (Linnaeus). Northern Phalarope. Kai- 
yat-ro-y5-a'luk (Mackenzie Eskimo). Kti-yi-fo'tit (Alaskan 
Eskimo) . 

Generally distributed in summer from northern Alaska to Corona- 
tion Gulf. Rather rare and local in Colville region, Alaska; more 
common east of the Mackenzie, and the only species of Phalarope 



472 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

observed on the south side of Coronation Gulf. Nests on low, flat 
tundra, and the male bird sits on the eggs. 
(230) Gallinago delicata (Ord.). Wilson's Snipe. 

Not observed north of Hay River, Great Slave Lake, where the 
species seems to be numerous. 

(232) Macrorhamphus griseus scolopaceus (Say). Long-billed Dow- 
ticher. 

A few specimens seen in the Mackenzie delta, also downy young 
near mouth of Kuparuk River, northern Alaska, July 25th, 1909. 

(233) Micropalama himantopus (Bonaparte). Stilt Sandpiper. 

One male specimen was taken June 30th, 1911, on a low, marshy 
flat near mouth of Kogaryuak River, eighteen miles east of the mouth 
of the Coppermine. 

(239) Pisobia maculata (Vieillot). Pectoral Sandpiper, Nu-vak'- 
e-ruk (Alaskan Eskimo). Pu-i-ji-shuk'tok (Baillie Islands). 

Nesting commonly on tundra flats from the Colville delta, Alaska, 
east ; abundant east of the Mackenzie delta and in the Cape Bathurst 
region. Very rare near Coronation Gulf. Shortly after the arrival 
of the Pectoral Sandpipers early in June, the male begins a succession 
of soaring flights, with neck swollen up and hanging down lower 
than the breast, at the same time uttering a dull, muffled " dthoo ! 
dthoo!" At this season the thick growth of loose, fatty, fibrous 
tissue on the neck and breast of the male Sandpiper is much de- 
veloped. The female Sandpiper has only a slight development of 
this fatty tissue. 

(241) Pisobia bairdi (Coues). Baird's Sandpiper. Li-wa'li-wak 
(Alaskan Eskimo). Ni-vi-li-vi-la'luk (Baillie Islands Eskimo). 

Fairly common, and breeding at various points along the Arctic 
coast from Alaska to Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island. Nests 
somewhat locally, usually on dry ground near the coast. Sometimes 
the species is absent a certain point and abundant only a few miles 
away. 

(242) Pisobia minutilla (Vieillot). Least Sandpiper. 

Specimen taken at Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, and oc- 
casionally observed near the mouth of the Mackenzie. 
(243 a) Pelidna alpina sakhalina (Vieillot). Red-backed Sand- 
piper. I'lak-teriik — "It had a patch" (on breast) — 
(Alaskan Eskimo). 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 473 

Fairly common in the Colville River delta, Alaska, in June. One 
set of four eggs, incubation begun, taken from a slight hollow in the 
ground, lined with small dead leaves, and partially concealed by 
grass, on a gently sloping hillside. The black belly-patch was noted 
on specimens seen August 1st, but on August 30th, the fall plumage 
had been donned. 

(246) Ereunetes pusillus (Linnaeus). Semipalmated Sandpiper. 
Nu-wi-hluk' (Port Clarence). Li-wa'-li-wak (Colville). 
Ni-vi-li-vi-la' uk (Baillie Islands). 

Common, and breeding everywhere along the Arctic coast from 
northern Alaska to Coronation Gulf. No specimens referable to 
E. mauri (Western Sandpiper) were taken, all being typical pusillus. 
Nests were found almost anywhere on tussocks on wet, boggy land, 
in bunches of moss, or on dry, barren ground. Sometimes a Semi- 
palmated Sandpiper will hover in the air like a big humming-bird, 
at the same time uttering a continuous twitter. At other times, 
while flitting about over the water, singly, in pairs, or in groups of 
three or four, their rapid motions reminded me of swallows. 
(248) Calidris leucophaea (Pallas). Sanderling. 

Fairly common on Cape Bathurst in August. Not found nest- 
ing. 
(250) Limosa lapponica baueri Naumann. Pacific Godwit. 

Shot one male, July 5th, 1909, in a wide, marshy flat in Colville 
delta, Alaska, about ten miles below the mouth of Itkillik River. 
The bird was alone, and kept uttering a loud, clear whistle, resembling 
the note of a Curlew. 
(255) Totanus fiavipes (Gmelin). Yellowlegs. 

One specimen seen on the portage between Smith's Landing and 
Fort Smith, Slave River, June 2d, 1908. At Hay River, Mr. H. W. 
Jones noted the first arrival May 2d, 1908. 

(262) Tryngites suhruficollis (Vieillot). Buff-breasted Sandpiper. 
Saw two Buff-breasted Sandpipers near Cape Halkett, Alaska, 

June 3d, 1909. Saw two flocks of six or seven each feeding on damp 
tundra near Cape Bathurst, July 6th, 1912, and killed two. This 
beautiful species is apparently very rare on the Arctic coast. 

(263) Actitis macularia (Linnaeus). Spotted Sandpiper. 
Common everywhere along the Athabaska, Slave, and Mackenzie 



474 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

rivers, about to the northern Kmit of trees. Not seen in northern 

Alaska or east of the Mackenzie. 

(265) Numenius hudsonicus Latham. Hudsonian Curlew. 

Saw one bird, probably of this species, on Herschel Island, 
August 4th, 1908. It was very noisy, and very wild, and I could not 
get within gunshot. 

(270) Squatarola squatarola (Linnaeus). Black-billed Plover. Tti'- 
lik (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Found in small numbers nesting in the Colville River delta, Alaska, 
near Cape Bathurst, and on southern Victoria Island. Nests are 
very difficult to find, as one Plover is always on the lookout, and 
gives warning when a person approaches. The incubating bird 
then shps quietly away from the nest until the danger passes. A 
nest with two half-incubated eggs was found on a flat, sandy island 
in Colville delta, June 27th, 1909. Another nest with four eggs, about 
one fourth incubated, was found July 9th, and four eggs just ready 
to hatch on July 20th. While we were near the nest, the Plover 
frequently uttered a mellow "Tu-li-u"' note, while trying to decoy 
us away. When migrating, the call note is a clear ''Tu-likV the first 
syllable prolonged, the last one short. At Kittigaryuit, east branch of 
Mackenzie, the first spring migrates appeared May 24th. They were 
migrating westward at Barter Island, Alaska, September 2d, 1908. 
(272) Charadrius dominicus dominicus (Miiller). Golden Plover. 
Tu'hk (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Rather rare on the north coast of Alaska. The first pair posi- 
tively identified were nesting east of the Colville delta, July 15th, 
1909, and three eggs taken, incubation advanced. The usual note 
resembles that of the Black-bellied Plover, but is perhaps a trifle 
less loud. The Eskimo have the same name "Tu-lik" (in imitation 
of the note) for both species. When the nest was approached, the 
Plover would approach with wings spread and slightly drooping, 
uttering a plaintive "peent," sometimes wailing out a mournful 
"Tu-lik" or a sharp "Cheep ! Cheep I" A few Golden Plovers seen 
July 21st-22d at mouth of Kuparuk River, and four east of Colhnson 
Point, Alaska, August 8th, 1909. 

Several pairs were nesting on Baillie Islands in 1912, and I found 
one slightly incubated set of four eggs while hunting nests in a slight 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 475 

snow-storm on the night of July 3d. On July 6th, I found four young 
Plovers just hatched near Cape Bathurst. 

(273) Oxyechus vociferus (Linnseus). Killdeer. 

Common as far north as Fort Chipewyan on Athabaska 
Lake. 

(274) Mgialitis semipalmata (Bonaparte). Semipalmated Plover. 
Ko-li-ka-li-a'lok (Mackenzie Eskimo). Harl-rug (Coronation 
Gulf Eskimo). 

Common on sand-bars along the Slave, Mackenzie, and Peel 
rivers, nesting in the Colville delta, Alaska, in the Mackenzie delta, 
and rather commonly on the south shore of Coronation Gulf. A set 
of four fresh eggs was taken June 16th, and another set of four half- 
incubated eggs June 25th, 1911, near mouth of Kogaryuak River, 
Coronation Gulf. Downy young were taken on the west branch of 
the Mackenzie delta July 20th, 1910. 

(283 a) Arenaria interpres momiella (Linnaeus). Ruddy Turn- 
stone. Tel-i'gu-ak (Alaskan Eskimo). 

Rather rare, and locally distributed. First seen near Cape 
Halkett, Alaska, May 29th, 1909. Several pairs seen in the Colville 
delta in June and July, 1909, and two sets of four eggs, far advanced 
in incubation, were taken June 27th on a low, flat, sandy delta island. 
The female Turnstone was very tame and returned to the nest several 
times to be photographed, the last time with the camera at a distance 
of two feet and eight inches. Turnstones were also seen at Cape 
Bathurst and on south side of Coronation Gulf in the spring, but 
none remained to breed. Several pairs were seen on beach at Austin 
Bay, Victoria Island, July 23d, 1911, and four downy young were 
captured. Old birds have the legs brilliant red and young birds dull 
red. 

(298 6) Canachites canadensis osgoodi Bishop. Alaska Spruce 
Partridge. 

I never met with this species personally in the Arctic, either in 
timber on the south side of Endicott Mountains, in the Mackenzie 
delta, or at east end of Great Bear Lake. Messrs. Joseph Hodgson, 
CD. Melvill, and J. Hornby told me that Partridges, presumably 
this species, are fairly common around the western end of Great 
Bear Lake and at Fort Norman. 



476 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

(300 h) Bonasaumhellus uvibelloides (Douglas). Gray Ruffed Grouse. 

One seen at Fort McKay on the Athabaska River, May 18th, and 
others heard drumming at other points. One female specimen, which 
was accompanied by two or three half-grown young birds, was taken 
at Fort Providence on the Mackenzie June 27th, 1908. The crop of 
this bird was full of the white buds and blossoms of the wild pea-vine. 
Not observed north of Fort Providence. 

(301) Lagopus lagopus lagopus (Linnaeus). Willow Ptarmigan. 
A-ka'gi-rik (Alaskan Eskimo). A-kri-gi-a'luk (Mackenzie 
Eskimo). 

The two species of Ptarmigan are probably the most important 
game-birds of the Arctic for the reason that they are almost univer- 
sally distributed, and are practically the only game-birds available 
during at least seven months of the year. The Willow Ptarmigan 
begins to change from the dark, mottled summer plumage to the 
white winter plumage early in September, and is usually nearly all 
white by the first of October. During the transition period no two 
birds are alike, being mottled and pied in the most bizarre patterns. 
In spring the males begin to molt first, appearing with dark brown 
head and neck early in May, and at this season are very noisy as well 
as conspicuous in appearance. The brown feathers on the back 
come out very slowly, and often the Ptarmigan do not get the full 
summer plumage before the end of June. Females usually attain 
the summer plumage by the end of May. The eggs are usually 
laid by the middle of June. In northern Alaska the great bulk of 
the Willow Ptarmigan go up into the mountain valleys in October, 
returning to the coast in April. They are found along the coast 
in summer from Smith Bay, Alaska, to Liverpool Bay. East of 
Liverpool Bay the Willow Ptarmigan come as far north as Harrowby 
Bay to the south end of Franklin Bay, Horton River, and are ex- 
ceedingly abundant at the northeast end of Great Bear Lake. None 
were seen in the vicinity of Coronation Gulf. In winter the Ptar- 
migan feed chiefly on willow buds and in summer on buds of various 
kinds, seeds, the red bearberry, crowberry, etc. The Eskimo do 
not hunt them regularly, but kill a good many in the course of a year 
with guns, snares, and occasionally in nets, looking upon the Ptarmi- 
gan as an ever present resource in times of scarcity of other food. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 477 

The Ptarmigan are so abundant and generally distributed that the 
hunting of the Eskimo has very little effect upon the numbers of 
birds. Fifteen Willow Ptarmigan killed in October weighed twenty- 
two pounds. Rock Ptarmigan average considerably smaller. 
(302) Lagopus rwpestris rupestris (Gmelin). Rock Ptarmigan. 
Nik-shak'tiing-6k (Alaskan Eskimo). Nik-shak-ti-ra'luk 
(Mackenzie Eskimo). Both species are commonly classed 
together as A-kri-gi-a'wit. 
The Rock Ptarmigan is somewhat smaller than the Willow 
Ptarmigan and is further distinguished by having a well-defined 
black streak of feathers before the eye and an obscure streak in the 
female. The habits are similar, and the two species are commonly 
found together. In northern Alaska the Rock Ptarmigan are com- 
monly found farther up in the mountains in winter, but come down 
to the sea coast in the spring. North of the tree line in the Mackenzie 
delta the species are about equally numerous, while at Cape Bathurst 
and on the Barren Grounds around Coronation Gulf and on Victoria 
Island the Rock Ptarmigan is found to the exclusion of other species. 
In spring the Copper Eskimo kill a good many with their bows and 
arrows. On the shores of Franklin Bay fresh eggs were found about 
the middle of June. Like the Willow Ptarmigan, the food is prin- 
cipally willow buds and leaves, but in the spring large quantities 
of berries are eaten, principally the black crowberries, and in many 
cases the breasts and bills of the Ptarmigan are stained purple by 
berry juice. Although the female Rock Ptarmigan changes to the 
summer plumage early in the summer, the plumage of the male 
remains unchanged until nearly the last of June. Male Rock Ptar- 
migan usually present a dirty, stained, and unkempt appearance 
during the month of June. While the female Ptarmigan is nesting, 
the male Ptarmigan is usually mounting guard on a little knoll 
near by. In the springtime the male Rock Ptarmigan frequently 
springs up thirty or forty feet into the air, dropping to the ground 
with a rattling, croaking sound. 

(316) Zenaidura macroura carolinensis (Linnaeus). Mourning Dove. 
Mr. Harry W. Jones informed me that a pair were seen and one 
secured at Hay River, Great Slave Lake, June 13th, 1908 ; very rare, 
and the species unknown to the natives there. 



478 MY LIFE, WITH THE ESKIMO 

(331) Circus Tiudsonius (Linnseus). Marsh Hawk. Ki-la-rek 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 
Occasionally seen at various points on the Arctic coast east and 
west of the delta of the Mackenzie. 
(334) Astur atricapillus atricayillus (Wilson). Goshawk. 

Occasionally seen on the south side of the Endicott Mountains, 
Alaska, and on Horton River. 
(337 h) Buteo borealis calurus Cassin. Western Redtail. 

Observed on Slave River, near below mouth of Salt River, June 
nth, 1908. 

(347 a) Archihuteo lagopus sancti-johannis (Gmelin). Rough-legged 
Hawk. Ki-la-rek (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 
Nesting on mud bluffs at Herschel Island, along the west side of 
Franklin Bay, and very commonly on ledges of the diabase cliffs on 
south side of Coronation Gulf. 

(349) Aquila chrysoetos (Linnseus). Golden Eagle. Ting-miak'- 
puk (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at Hay River, April 30th, 
1908. Rests regularly on steep bluff banks of Horton River about 
fifteen miles south of Langton Bay. Saw one specimen near Cape 
Bathurst June 28th, 1912. 
(356 a) Falco peregrinus anatum Bonaparte. Duck Hawk. 

Observed on the Hula-hula River, Alaska, at Escape Reef, Mac- 
kenzie Bay, Horton River, and Coronation Gulf. Specimen taken 
near Langton Bay, where a pair nested in Melville Mountains in 
1911. Captain F. Wolki found a nest containing eggs April 18th, 1912, 
in a nest at top of a spruce stub near the northern limit of trees on 
Horton River. 
(357) Falco columharius columharius Linnaeus. Pigeon Hawk. 

Small Hawks, probably of this species, were seen occasionally on 
Horton River, south of Langton Bay. 
(364) Pandion haliaetus carolinensis (Gmelin). Osprey. 

Observed on the Athabaska River, Alberta. 
(367) Asio fiammeus (Pontoppidan) . Short-eared Owl. Ni-pai- 
hluk'tak (Alaskan Eskimo). Ni-pai-ngak'tak (Mackenzie 
Eskimo) . 
Found sparsely at all points along the Arctic coast. One set of 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 479 

four eggs taken by myself on Coronation Gulf, June 23d, and another 
set by J. F. Bernard, July 1st, 1911. 

(370) Scotiaptex nebulosa nehulosa (J. R. Forster). Great Gray 
Owl. Na'tak (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

One female specimen taken December 13tli, 1908; another female 
January 5th, 1909, in spruce timber on south side of Endicott Range, 
Alaska. Another seen January 16th and still another on February 
4th, 1909. After crossing to the north side of the Endicott Mountains 
and many miles north of the tree line, one of my Eskimos, a reliable 
man, said that he saw a Na'tak alighted on a rock quite near him 
as he was coming down a little creek gorge on March 26th. He was 
positive of its identity. 

(371) Cryptoglaux funerea richardsoni (Bonaparte). Richardson's 
Owl. 

Did not observe this species, but it was reported as being occasion- 
ally seen in winter in the heavy timber near the mouth of Dease 
River. 

(376) Nycfea nydea (Linnaeus). Snowy Owl. Ug'pik (Alaskan 
and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Fairly common summer resident all along the Arctic coast and 
occasionally seen in winter. Varies much in numbers during dif- 
ferent years, the number apparently fluctuating according to the 
abundance of mice and lemmings, which form its principal food. The 
Snowy Owl is considered one of the choicest of game-birds by the 
Eskimo, as it is usually fat and in good condition. 
(377 a) Surnia ulula caparoch (Miiller). Hawk-Owl. ' 

This species was not observed by our party in the North. Mr. 
H. W. Jones gave his first spring record as May 1st, 1908, at Hay 
River, but thought that the species remained there all winter. 
(390) Ceryle alcyon (Linnseus). Belted Kingfisher. 

The only Arctic record which I have of this species is a single 
specimen seen near the mouth of Peel River, below Fort McPherson, 
July 18th, 1910. 

(393 a) Dryohates villosus leucomelas (Boddaert). Northern Hairy 
Woodpecker. 

A few specimens observed on the Athabaska River, Alberta, but 
none farther north. 



480 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

(400) Picoides arcticus (Swainson) . Arctic Three-toed Woodpecker. 

One seen on brule on Smith's Portage, Slave River, June 2d, 1908. 
Captain J. W. Mills of Fort Smith told me that he shot one in the 
same place the autumn before, the only one he saw. 
(401 a) Picoides americanus faseiatus Baird. Alaska Three-toed 
Woodpecker. Tu'yuk (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Mr. H W. Jones gives his first 1908 record as May 4th at Hay 
River, and one specimen taken May 30th, 1908. I saw one specimen 
December 20th, 1908, in heavy spruce timber on the south side of the 
Endicott Range, Alaska. The species is fairly well known to the 
Eskimo of the Mackenzie delta, and I heard one calling in the timber 
on a wooded island on the east branch of delta. One of our Eskimo 
also reported seeing a single bird in spruce timber on Horton River 
about fifteen miles south of Langton Bay early in October, 1910. 
(402) Sphyrapicus varius varius (Linnaeus). Yellow-bellied Sap- 
sucker. 

Common and nesting as far north as Fort Smith on the Slave 
River. 

(412) Colaptes auratus luteus Bangs. Northern Flicker. 

Fairly common on the Athabaska and Slave rivers. Mr. H. W. 
Jones noted the species at Hay River in 1908. 

(413) Colaptes cafer collaris Vigors. Red-shafted Flicker. 

Saw one pair on Smith's Portage, Slave River, June 8th, 1908; 
none others seen. 
(420) Chordeiles mrginianus virginianus (Gmelin). Night-hawk. 

Fairly common at Fort Smith, on the Slave River, in June, 1908. 
A specimen taken was of the typical dark-colored Eastern variety. 

(456) Saornis phoebe (Latham). Phoebe. 

Common on Athabaska and Slave rivers and noted on the Mac- 
kenzie as far north as Fort Providence. 

(457) Saornis sayus (Bonaparte). Say's Phoebe. 

Mr. H. W. Jones notes a pair seen and one specimen secured 
May 7th, 1908, at Hay River. On July 8th, 1910, 1 saw a single bird 
on the wdllow-grown flats of Peel River at Fort McPherson. 
(459) Nuttallornis horealis (Swainson). Olive-sided Flycatcher. 

Two or three specimens seen on Smith's Portage, Slave River, 
June 8th, 1908. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 481 

(463) Empidonax flaviventris (W. M. and S. F. Baird). Yellow- 
bellied Flycatcher. 

Shot a female specimen at Smith's Landing on the Slave River, 
June 6th, 1908. 
(466 a) Empidonas trailli alnorum Brewster. Alder Flycatcher. 

Saw a few specimens in willow and alder thickets in delta of 
Slave River and shot one male June 23d, 1908. Mr. H. W. Jones 
notes the first arrival at Hay River June 5th, and one specimen taken 
June 9th, 1908. 

(474 k) Otocoris alpestris hoyti Bishop. Hoyt's Horned Lark. 
A-ku-li-wak'shuk. A-ku-li-wak'shi-dVak (Mackenzie Eski- 
mo). 

Nesting in small numbers at Herschel Island, Cape Bathurst, 
Franklin Bay, and on the south side of Coronation Gulf. A nest 
with five eggs, taken June 15th, 1911, at mouth of Kogaryuak River, 
was like an ordinary first nest of the Prairie Horned Lark, a little 
hollow sunken in the ground, lined with a few grasses and feathers, 
on flat, dry, sandy soil, where vegetation was very short and scanty 
(not over half an inch high). 

(484) Perisoreus canadensis canadensis (Linnaeus). Canada Jay. 
Ke'yuk (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Common along the Athabaska, Slave, and Mackenzie rivers 
as far north as the limit of trees in the Mackenzie delta. Mr. H. W. 
Jones told me that he had taken nests and eggs at Hay River, the 
earliest date being May 18th, the latest June 3d (the latter advanced 
in incubation). Sergeant J. A. E. Selig found a nest near Fort Mc- 
Pherson early in the spring of 1909, and Captain F. Wolki found a 
nest on the lower Horton River in early spring, when the weather 
was so cold that the Jay could scarcely be made to leave her nest. 
The Jays become very tame around camp and are a nuisance at 
times, as they come up to the meat-drying racks and pick away the 
choice bits of fat from drying Caribou meat, gorging themselves 
and carrying away large pieces. They do not seem to travel 
far from their own particular creek valleys in winter, and if the 
Jays are killed off around a camp, the locality is seldom visited by 
other Jays, even if they are common in another valley less than a 
mile away. 
2i 



482 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

(484 b) Perisoreus canadensis fumifrons Ridgway. Alaska Jay. 
Ke'ruk (Alaskan Eskimo). 

Several seen on the south slope of the Endicott Mountains on 
branches of the Chandlar River in 1909. One seen in the willows 
several miles north of the last trees on the river. They are as tame 
and inquisitive as the eastern representative. One came up within 
fifteen or twenty feet of us while we were cutting up a Mountain 
Sheep. 

(486 a) Corvus corax principalis Ridgway. Northern Raven. Tu- 
lu'ak (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Generally distributed everywhere in the Arctic, but not very 
abundant anywhere. Usually shy and wary, but I have seen Ravens 
so gorged with meat from a stranded whale's carcass that they would 
scarcely get out of the way. Ravens often cause annoyance by 
springing Fox or Wolf traps or by eating meat left uncovered on the 
hunting field. I have seen Alaskan Eskimo set up empty brass 
cartridges on sticks near a dead Caribou to keep Ravens from molest- 
ing the game. Ravens on southern Victoria Island were very tame, 
allowing us to approach within twenty-five yards. The only nest 
I found was on a ledge of black diabase rock in Bloody Fall gorge, 
nine miles from the mouth of the Coppermine, May 21st, 1911, but it 
was practically inaccessible. The Raven left the nest, but came back 
to it while we were watching her at a distance of about fifty feet. 
(488) Corvus brachyrhynchos brachyrhyncJios Brehm. Crow. 

Fairly common on the Athabaska, River du Rochers, and Slave 
River in 1908. Mr. H. W. Jones reported it common at Hay River; 
the first seen there April 15th and eggs taken May 24th. 
(495) Molothrus ater ater (Boddaert). Cow-bird. 

A few seen on the Athabaska River. Mr. H. W. Jones states 
that the species is rare at Hay River. 

(497) Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus (Bonaparte). Yellow-headed 
Blackbird. 

Shortly before noon on October 12th, 1912, on the Arctic Ocean, 
about one hundred miles west of Point Hope, Alaska, a female (or 
young male) flew all around the whaler Belvedere. It seemed very 
tired, but afraid to aHght as it fluttered about the rigging. It rested 
a few times, and finally darted under the forecastle head. I tried to 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 483 

catch it and touched the bird with one hand as it came out. Watched 
it within ten feet distance for some time and was sure of identity — 
rusty brown plumage; dull yellow (mixed with a little whitish) on 
throat and breast, and a little white on bend of wing. This species 
was not observed elsewhere in the North. 
(498 d) Agelaius phceniceus fortis Ridgway. Thick-billed Redwing. 

Fairly common and nesting on Smith's Portage in the Slave 
River delta in June. Mr. Harry W. Jones noted the first arrival at 
Hay River April 29th, 1908. Not observed north of this point. 
(501, 1) Sturnella neglecta Audubon, Western Meadow-lark. 

A few seen between Edmonton and Athabaska Landing. Not 
observed north of Athabaska Landing, Alberta. 
(509) Euphagus carolinus (Miiller). Rusty Blackbird. Tii-lu- 
o'rak, the little Raven (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Common in the Mackenzie delta in summer, going some distance 
north of the northern limit of trees. 
(511 b) Quiscalus quiscula CBneus Ridgway. Bronzed Grackle. 

Mr. H. W. Jones reported seeing one April 28th, 1908, at Hay 
River. I did not observe the species myself. 

(515 c) Pinicola enucleator alascensis Ridgway. Alaska Pine Gros- 
beak. 

Observed one or two specimens of this species in December, 1908, 
and January, 1909, on a branch of the Chandlar River, on south side 
of Endicott Mountains, Alaska. ■ Pine Grosbreaks were not observed 
in any other locality. 
(517) Carpodacus purpureus purpureits (Gmelin). Purple Finch. 

Five or six males seen at the Grand Rapids of Athabaska River, 
Alberta, May 13th, 1908. 

(521) Loxia curvirostra minor (Brehm) . Crossbill. 

Saw a number of specimens, both males and females, on Smith's 
Portage, Slave River, June 8th and 10th, 1908. 

(522) Loxia leucoptera Gmelin. White-winged Crossbill. 

Noted at various points on the Athabaska River in May, 1908. 
A Juvenal female in streaky plumage taken at Fort Chipewyan, on 
Athabaska Lake, May 27th. Several were seen feeding on spruce 
cones. Several seen on Smith's Portage, Slave River, June 10th. 
The only place where I observed them north of the Arctic Circle 



484 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

was in spruce timber on Dease River, northeast of Great Bear Lake, 
in January and May, 1911. 

(523) Leucostide griseonucha (Brandt). Aleutian Rosy Finch. 
Fairly common in Unalaska harbor, Aleutian Islands, Alaska, 

October 16th-17th, 1912, alighting on rigging of ships, and on docks 
and buildings. 

(524) Leucostide tephrocotis tephrocotis Swainson. Gray-crowned 
Rosy Finch. 

One seen May 3d, 1908, near Athabaska Landing, Alberta, in 
a burned-out poplar thicket. 

(527 a) Acanthis hornemanni exilipes (Coues). Hoary Redpoll. 
Suk-sung'ok (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

A few seen on both sides of the Endicott Mountains, Alaska, from 
September to January. Commonly nesting in the Mackenzie delta 
as far north as Richard Island. A number of nests taken in dense 
willow thickets near mouth of Kogaryuak River, eighteen miles east 
of the Coppermine River, Coronation Gulf, from June 16th to July 
11th, 1911. Nests from one to three feet from the ground in small 
willows; composed externally of small dead grasses and equisetse 
mixed with cottony substances, lined with willow cotton, and in some 
cases an inner lining of soft feathers (usually of Ptarmigan). 
(528) Acarithis linaria linaria (Linnaeus). Redpoll. Suk-sung'ok 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Fairly common at the mouth of the Kogaryuak River, Coronation 
Gulf, nesting in willow thickets in company with the Hoary 
Redpoll. Nests identical in location and structure. Probably also oc- 
curs with the Hoary Redpoll in the Mackenzie region, although no 
specimens were taken there. 

(533) Spinus pinus (Wilson) . Pine Siskin. 

A nest with three eggs, advanced in incubation, was found in a 
White Spruce tree, about fifteen feet from the ground on Moose 
Island, Great Slave Lake, June 24th, 1908. A few Siskins were seen 
here, but none elsewhere. 

(534) Pledrophenax nivalis nivalis (Linnaeus). Snow Bunting. 
A-mau'lik (Alaskan Eskimo). A-mau'h-ra'luk (Mackenzie 
Eskimo). 

Fairly common everywhere along the Arctic coast in summer, but 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 485 

seldom seen far from the coast during the breeding season. In 
1908 the last were seen September 20th, at the Hula-hula River, 
Alaska. The first spring arrival was April 1st, 1909, on the Hula-hula, 
but no more were seen until May 11th at Cape Halkett. In 1910 
the first were seen April 9th on Liverpool Bay; in 1911 the first on 
April 19th on Coronation Gulf. On the north coast of Alaska and 
east of the Mackenzie the Snow Bunting usually builds its nest in 
cavities or crevices among old driftwood logs. Farther east, as in 
Coronation Gulf, where large driftwood is scarce, the birds apparently 
nest in crevices of rocks. At Baillie Islands nests were observed on 
jib-sheets of schooner, in cabin of schooner, in paint can on top of 
rack, under false bottom of whaleboat, and in Eskimo coffins (above 
ground) . Around the settlements they are about as tame as English 
Sparrows. 

(536) Calcarius lapponicus lapponicus (Linnaeus). Lapland Long- 
spur. 

(537) Calcarius pictus (Swainson). Smith's Longspur. 

Mr. H, W. Jones reported the first arrival of this species at Hay 
River, May 12th, 1908, and took one specimen. Saw a pair, male and 
female, near the mouth of Kogaryuak River, Coronation Gulf, June 
30th, 1911, and shot the male. Saw a specimen here on one or two 
occasions. 

(542 h) Passerculus sandwichensis alaudinus Bonaparte. Western 
Savannah Sparrow. Shak-shag-i-a'luk (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Fairly common everywhere in grassy situations, breeding in the 
Slave River delta, Colville River delta, Alaska, Mackenzie delta, and 
Coronation Gulf. Dr. Jonathan Dwight, Jr., Dr. Louis P,. Bishop, 
and Mr. A. C. Bent examined all my specimens of this group and 
referred them all (Mackenzie and Coronation Gulf) to the slender- 
billed western form alaudinus. 
(548) Passerherbulu^ lecontei (Audubon). Leconte's Sparrow. 

Saw two specimens and shot one male on wet, marshy flats at 
west end of Athabaska Lake, Alberta, May 22d, 1908. Mr. H. W. 
Jones took a specimen at Hay River, west end of Great Slave Lake, 
June 23d, 1908. 
(553) Zonotrichia querula (Nuttall). Harris's Sparrow. 

Mr. H. W. Jones reports the first arrival at Hay River, Great 



486 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Slave Lake, May 14th, 1908, at which time several flocks were seen, 
and male and female specimens taken. 

(554 a) Zonotrichia leucophrys gamheli (Nuttall). Gambel's 
Sparrow. 
Common all along the Mackenzie River in summer nearly to the 
northern limit of trees in the delta. Very musical, singing at all 
hours of the day and night. Near the mouth of Kogaryuak River, 
Coronation Gulf, one was seen several times in a thick clump of wil- 
lows June 19th, 1911, apparently with a nest in the vicinity. The 
bird was later (June 28th) taken for a specimen (the only .Arctic 
record which I have for the species outside of the Mackenzie 
delta). 

(558) Zonotrichia alhicollis (Gmelin). White-throated Sparrow. 
Noted on the Mackenzie as far north as Fort Norman at the mouth 

of Great Bear River. 

(559) Spizella monticola monticola (Gmelin). Tree Sparrow. 
Rather locally distributed on the Arctic coast, but fairly common 

in places north of the tree line, where willow thickets are found near 
the coast. Common on the south end of Richard Island and the 
adjacent mainland ; a few near Demarcation Point and one on the 
west side of Franklin Bay. Nesting commonly on the south side 
of Coronation Gulf ; three nests with six eggs each were taken June 
16th, 1911 — nests all on ground in bunches of grass in open willow 
scrub and very artistically built of bits of green moss, a middle layer 
of grasses, and an inner lining of cotton and feathers. All the speci- 
mens in my series of skins from Coronation Gulf and Mackenzie 
are undoubtedly S. m. monticola. The only specimens observed in 
Alaska were a few in the Colville delta, where a nest with young birds 
was found July 6th, 1909. The Alaska birds may possibly be referable 
to S. monticola ochracea Brewster (Western Tree Sparrow). 
(560 a) Spizella passerina arizonce Coues. Western Chipping 
Sparrow. 

Fairly common at all the Athabaska and Slave rivers as far north 
as Hay River. Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at Hay River 
May 27th, and took male and female with four young June 23d, 1908. 
(561) Spizella pallida (Swainson). Clay-colored Sparrow. 

Mr. H. W. Jones took sets of four eggs June 19th, and five eggs 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 487 

fresh, on June 26th, 1908, at Hay River. Not observed north of this 

point. 

(567) Junco hyemalis hyemalis (Linnaeus). Slate-colored Junco. 

Common on the Mackenzie River in summer, north nearly to the 
limit of trees in the delta. A set of four eggs with parent, incubation 
begun, was taken at Fort Chipewyan, Lake Athabaska, May 25th, 
1908, on top of a granite ridge, imbedded in moss and covered with 
several branches of low spreading juniper. One specimen seen on 
Dease River, May 10th, 1911, but I am informed that the species is 
common at east end of Great Bear Lake a little later in the season. 
Shot a male near mouth of Bear River at Fort Norman, July 7th, 
1908. A pair were evidently nesting near the river. 
(567/) Junco hyemalis montanus Ridgway. Montana Junco. 

At Fort Chipewj^an, Lake Athabaska, May 23d, 1908, I shot a 
female specimen with pinkish sides — ovaries not well developed. 
Near Fort Norman, July 9th, 1908, 1 took a female Montana Junco 
with nests and four eggs, advanced in incubation, near the summit of 
Bear Rock, the highest elevation in this vicinity, east of the Mackenzie 
River. The nest was placed in a hollow beside a lichen-covered rock, 
composed of coarse gray weeds and lined with fine yellowish grass. 
My specimens of Junco were determined by Dr. Jonathan Dwight, 
Jr., the well-known authority on this difficult group. 
(581) Melospiza melodia melodia (Wilson). Song Sparrow. 

Common as far north as the delta of the Slave River. 

(583) Melospiza lincolni lincolni (Audubon). Lincoln's Sparrow. 
Saw one bird on the Athabaska River May 15th, 1908, and took a 

nest and four young at Hay River June 25th, 1908. Mr. H. W. Jones 
noted the first arrival at Hay River May 12th, 1908, and took eggs 
June 17th-22d. The species breeds abundantly at Hay River. I 
saw quite a number at Fort Wrigley on the Mackenzie, but none north 
of this point. 

(584) Melospiza georgiana Latham. Swamp Sparrow. 

Shot one male specimen in the Slave River delta June 22d, 1908 ; 
not observed elsewhere. 

(585) Passer ella iliaca iliaca (Merrem). Fox Sparrow. 

Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrivals at Hay River May 13th, 
1908, and all apparently passed to the northward. Later he found 



488 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

a nest, June 6th, containing two eggs which were hatched June 7th 
or 8th. I saw one on east branch of Mackenzie June 22, near the 
mouth of Peel River June 28th, 1910. The only Fox Sparrows seen 
north of the tree hue were two specimens on mainland east of Richard 
Island, where two were seen in willow shrubs two or three feet high, 
May 31st, 1910. One of these birds was in full song. 
(612) Petrochelidon lunifrons lunifrons (Say). Cliff Swallow. 

Common at various points along the Mackenzie River. Noticed 
large numbers building nests on sides of a steep granite island in 
Slave River, above Smith's Landing, May 29th, 1908. At Fort 
McPherson, June 30th, 1910, three or four pairs of Cliff Swallows were 
nesting under the eaves of the R.N.W.M.P. barracks and the Mis- 
sion House. Rev. C. E. Whittaker said that the summer of 1909 was 
the first time that the species had appeared there. On the Dease 
River, northeast of Great Bear Lake, I saw a large group of the bottle- 
shaped nests on the side of a rocky gorge. 
(614) Iridoprocne hicolor (Vieillot). Tree Swallow. 

Noted on the Athabaska and Slave rivers. At Smith's Landing, 
Slave River, May 30th, 1908, the Tree Swallows were common on the 
water front. I found no nests, but people there said that the Tree 
Swallows built nests under the gable ends of houses. 
(616) Riparia riparia (Linnaeus). Bank Swallov/. Tii-lu-ak-na'luk 
(Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Abundant all along the Athabaska, Slave, and Mackenzie rivers, 
nesting everywhere in suitable sand-banks north nearly to the limit 
of trees in the Mackenzie delta. In some places the river banks are 
literally honeycombed with their nesting burrows. I did not see 
any Bank Swallows in northern Alaska, but saw a cut bank on the 
Hula-hula River, north of the Endicott Mountains, thickly per- 
forated with holes. 
(618) Bomhycilla garrula (Linnaeus). Bohemian Waxwing. 

On Smith's Portage between Smith's Landing and Fort Smith on 
the Slave River, about a dozen Waxwings were seen, and three speci- 
mens shot June 8th, 1908. A nest with six eggs was found in a 
large Jack-pine (Pinus hanksiana) June 10th, 1908. Mr. H. W. Jones 
noted the first arrival at Hay River May 7th, 1908. In the west 
branch of the Mackenzie delta I shot a well-fledged young male 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 489 

July 20th, 1910 ; only one specimen was seen. The only other speci- 
mens seen in the Arctic were on the east branch of Dease River. On 
May 14th, 1911, several Bohemian Waxwings were seen in spruce 
trees around our house, one in the top of nearly every tree, uttering 
the peculiar lisping whistle so characteristic of the Waxwings. 
(622) Lanius borealis (Vieillot). Northern Shrike. 

The only specimen which I saw in the North was a single specimen 
which we saw near the northernmost spruce in the Mackenzie delta, 
between Tent Island and Richard Island, on September 11th, 1909. 
A single Northern Shrike alighted on our boat, clinging to the wire 
cable mainstay, but soon flew to the tip of the yard, then to the 
cross-stay of a schooner which was sailing alongside of us. The bird 
flew to land about a quarter of a mile away before I could get a gun 
ready. 
(624) Vireosylva olivacea (Linnseus). Red-eyed Vireo. 

Shot one male at Smith's Landing, Slave River, June 6th, 1908. 
Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at Hay River June 6th, and 
took a specimen June 9th. 
(629) Lanivireo solitarius solitarius (Wilson). Blue-headed Vireo. 

Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at Hay River May 23d, 
1908; specimen taken. 
(636) Mniotilta varia (Linnaeus). Black-and-white Warbler. 

Saw two pairs at Fort McKay, Athabaska River, May 18th, 
1908; the first Warblers of the season. 

(646) Verviivora celata celata (Say). Orange-crowned Warbler. 
Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at Hay River May 25th, 

1908 ; five fresh eggs were taken June 16th. , 

(647) Vermivora peregrina (Wilson). Tennessee Warbler. 
Fairly common around Smith's Landing, Slave River. Shot a 

male June 6th, 1908, which was singing from a treetop; note much 
Hke the warbling Vireo. Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at 
River June 11th, 1908. At Fort Providence the species was common. 
One male was shot at Fort Wrigley June 30th — the most northern 
point at which I observed the species. 
(652) Dendroica oestiva cBstiva (Gmelin). Yellow Warbler. Ku- 

a-ra-luk (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Abundant all along the Mackenzie River and nesting as far north 



490 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

as the south end of Richard Island, and the mainland on east 
side of Richard Island, twenty-five or thirty nailes north of the 
tree line. 
(655) Dendroica coronata (Linnaeus). Myrtle Warbler. 

Mr. H. W. Jones noted the first arrival at Hay River May 13th, 
1908; he shot one male May 16th. The birds all passed north 
and do not breed around Hay River. I did not observe the species 
at all in the North. 
(661) Dendroica striata (J. R. Forster). Black-poll Warbler. 

Shot one male in the Slave River delta June 18th, 1908, and 
found a nest with four eggs, advanced in incubation, on Moose 
Island, Great Slave Lake, June 24th, 1908. Mr. H. W. Jones 
noted the first arrival at Hay River June 2d, and took a specimen 
June 3d, 1908. 
(672) Dendroica palmarum palmarum (Gmelin). Palm Warbler. 

Two seen on Smith's Portage, Slave River, June 3d, 1908, but none 
observed north of this point. 

(675 a) Seiurus novehoracensis notabilis Ridgway. Grinnell's Water 
Thrush. 

Shot one specimen in the Slave River delta June 20th, 1908. Mr. 
H. W. Jones states that the species is rare at Hay River (Great Slave 
Lake), but abundant at Willow River, on the Mackenzie. June 23d, 
1910, I found a nest containing four eggs, incubation begun, on an 
island in the east branch of the Mackenzie delta. Flushed the bird 
from a mass of old driftwood near the river. The bird was very wary 
and kept well out of sight in thick willow and alder brush. The nest 
was soon found on the ground under a projecting root, and I returned 
later and captured the bird. 
(685) Wilsonia pusilla yusilla (Wilson). Wilson's Warbler. 

While at sea on S.S. Belvedere, Mackenzie Bay, west of Pullen 
Island and east of Sabine Point, about 69° 50' N. and 167° 15' W., 
August 31st, 1912, While the ship's boats were lowered for whales, 
a female Wilson's Warbler remained on the ship for an hour or two, 
flitting about among the rigging and running gear, from one end of 
the ship to the other, never going higher than ten feet above the deck. 
She made several starts to fly away, but as the wind was strong, 
the sea rough, and no land in sight, always came back. Watched 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 491 

the bird at a distance of less than ten feet for a long time, but could 
not catch her, and shooting was not permissible when bow-head whales 
were around. 
(687) Setophaga ruticilla (Linnaeus). Redstart. 

Mr. H. W. Jones says that species also is rare at Hay River, but 
abundant at Willow River, on the Mackenzie. Took one specimen 
at Fort Providence June 27th, and saw another at Fort Wrigley June 
30th, 1908. 

(696) Budytes fiavus alascensis Ridgway. Alaska Yellow Wagtail. 
Observed this species only in the Colville River delta, northern 

Alaska. The first glimpse of these beautiful birds was on July 4th, 
1908, a little above the trading rendezvous of Nigalik. A nest con- 
taining five recently hatched young was found on a level place near 
the river, traversed with a network of little ridges from six inches 
to two feet high, sparsely covered with weeds and low ground willows. 
The nest was placed under the side of a heavy tussock of turf, com- 
pletely covered by the turf and well concealed by long grasses on top 
of the tussock and around the sides ; nest neatly cupped and com- 
posed of grasses, lined with fine grass and feathers. When flying 
against the wind, the birds pursued an up-and-down seesaw course. 
Several pairs were seen farther up in the delta, nowhere numerous, 
but probably at least one or two pairs were nesting every half mile 
along the river, near the willows. A short distance from the river, 
where the tundra is bare, no Wagtails have been seen. 

(697) Anthus ruhescens (Tunstall). Pipit. Shung-ok-shi'a-fek 
(Alaskan Eskimo). 

Fairly common at various points along the Arctic coast, but 
somewhat local. Several seen on the Hula-hula River, Alaska, in 
September, a few at Herschel Island, and one nest taken on west 
side of Franklin Bay June 16th, 1912. Very common on the south 
side of Coronation Gulf, nesting in mossy hummocks at base of the 
numerous rocky cliffs. The males often sing while flying, soaring 
upward to a height of 40-50 feet in a gentle curve, then sailing down 
with wings and tail spread, usually alighting upon some flat-topped 
rock with a little run and with tail elevated. Note while soaring is 
a very quickly repeated tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet-tweet; sometimes 
tweet-tweet-tsi-u, tsi-u, tsi-u, tsi-U, tsi-u, tsi-u. 



492 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

(735 a) Penthestes atricapillus septentrionalis (Harris) . Long-tailed 
Chickadee. 
Observed at various points along the Athabaska in May, 1908. 
Common at Grand Rapids of Athabaska, May 14th. 

(739) Penthestes cinctus alascensis (Prazak). Alaska Chickadee. 
Mi-shi-ka'kak (Alaskan Eskimo). 

A few specimens seen in November and December, 1908, and 
January and February, 1909, in the willows on Hula-hula River, 
north side of Endicott Mountains, Alaska, and in spruce timber on 
south side of the divide. On the south side of Richard Island in the 
Mackenzie delta, thirty or forty miles north of the tree line, we saw a 
single Chickadee singing merrily in the willows, September 18th, 1909. 
I followed him a long way, from bush to bush, but he finally flew up 
into the air and went across to the mainland. On Horton River, 
October 18th and 23d, 1911, we saw a Chickadee, probably this 
species, about fifteen miles south of Langton Bay, the only Chicka- 
dee seen east of the Mackenzie delta. 

(740) Penthestes hudsonicus hudsonicus (J. R. Forster). Hudsonian 
Chickadee. 

Several seen on the Athabaska River, and one seen at Smith's 
Landing, Slave River, June 2d, 1908. Mr. H. W. Jones noted the 
first arrival of this species at Hay River (Great Slave Lake) on May 
12th, 1908. 

(749) Regulus calendula calendula (Linnaeus). Ruby-crowned King- 
let. 

On the morning of September 24th, 1912, I picked up a dead 
male Ruby-crowned Kinglet, on the deck of S. S. Belvedere, fifteen 
to twenty miles offshore on Harrison Bay, east of Cape Halkett, 
northern Alaska. The night before I had seen a small bird flitting 
across the poop of the Belvedere; only a glimpse, and I could not see 
the bird again. He was probably picked up somewhere off the 
western side of the Colville delta. 
(657) Hylocichla alicicB alicice (Baird). Gray-cheeked Thrush. 

Mr. H. W. Jones took a specimen at Hay River May 20th, 1908. 
Found one nest with three eggs in a spruce tree about four feet from 
the ground on a large, heavily wooded island in the eastern part of 
the Mackenzie delta June 24th, 1910. The eggs were greenish-blue 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 493 

with rich burnt sienna spots. Six or eight nests of similar construc- 
tion were found in the immediate vicinity. The parent birds were 
very shy and nervous. 

(738 a) Hylocichla ustulata swainsoni (Tschudi). OHve-backed 
Thrush. 

In dense willow thickets in Slave River delta I found one nest 
containing two fresh eggs June 22d, 1908, in a clump of willows about 
two and a half feet from the ground. The nest was quite loosely 
built, composed of coarse grass and moss and lined with fine grass ; 
eggs spotted. June 2d I found another nest containing one egg 
and three young birds, seven feet from the ground in a willow tree. 
The birds were very quiet and retiring. 
(759 6) Hylocichla guttata pallasi (Cabanis). Hermit Thrush. 

Mr. Harry W. Jones showed me a nest and four eggs taken at 
Hay River June 16th, 1908, incubation advanced. Eggs were plain 
blue color. 

(761) Planesticus migratoriiLS migratorius (Linnaeus). Robin. Kre- 
ku-ak'tu-yok (Mackenzie Eskimo). Shab'wak (Alaskan Eskimo). 

Nesting commonly all along the Athabaska, Slave, and Mackenzie 
rivers, a little beyond the northern limit of trees. At Fort Mc- 
Kay, on the Athabaska River, found nest with two eggs May 18th ; 
at Smith's Landing, Slave River, nest with young June 7th. At Fort 
Simpson, Mackenzie River, Robins were abundant ; one nest with four 
eggs under steps of the Hudson Bay Company's museum and another 
on a fish stage. A nest containing four young birds was found June 22d, 
on the east branch of the Mackenzie delta. The first Robin of the 
season was seen on Dease River May 10th, and one specimen was taken 
June 19th, 1911, near the mouth of Kogaryuak River, on south side 
of Coronation Gulf ; the only Robin which I have seen on the Arctic 
coast, although one specimen was seen at Herschel Island several 
years ago (according to accounts of the whalers) . Robins are fairly 
common in the spruce timber on Horton River fifteen or twenty 
miles south of Langton Bay. 

(763) Ixoreus ncevius meruloides (Swainson). Northern Varied 
Thrush. 

Several adults were seen on low, wooded islands on the western 
part of the Mackenzie River delta, and one fully fledged young bird 



494 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

was found dead on the ground in a willow thicket on the edge of 
heavy spruce timber. This is one of the very few species of western 
passerine birds which comes over into the Mackenzie delta. 
(765) Saxicola cenanthe oenanthe (Linnseus). Wheat-ear. 

The only specimen of this rather noticeable species observed was 
a Juvenal female taken at Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, July 
31st, 1908. The basal half of this bird's tail-feathers being white 
made it very conspicuous. The bird was very wild, and I chased it 
for some distance before getting near enough to shoot it. 
(768) Sialia currucoides (Bechstein). Mountain Bluebird. 

Saw several pairs of this beautiful species along the road from 
Edmonton to Athabaska Landing, Alberta, but none farther 
north. 

MAMMALS 

Order Cetacea — Cetaceans. 

Balcena mysticetus Linn. Arctic Bowhead Whale. AkVirk. 

Delphinapterus catodon (Linn.). White Whale. Kil-la-lu'ak. 
Order Ungulata — Hoofed Mammals. 

Cervus canadensis (Erxleben). Canadian Wapiti. 

Odocoileus hemionus (Rafinesque). Mule Deer. 

Alces americanus Jardine. Eastern Moose. Tuk'tu-vuk. 

Rangifer arcticus (Richardson). Barren Ground Caribou. 
TUk'tu. 

Bison hison athahascoe Rhoads. Wood Bison. 

Ovibos moschatus (Zimm.). Muskox. U'miii-muk. 

Ovis dalli (Nelson). Northern Mountain Sheep. Imp'nak. 
Order Rodentia — Rodents. 

Marmota caligata (Eschscholtz). Hoary Marmot. Tjik-rik- 
puk. 

Citellus parryi (Richardson). Hudson Bay Spermophile. Tjik- 
rik (W.). Tsik-tsik (E.). 

Citellus parryi kennicotti (Ross). Mackenzie Spermophile. 
Tjikrik. 

Citellus franklini (Sabine) . Franklin's Spermophile. 

Citellus tridecemlineatus (Mitchill). Thirteen-lined Spermophile. 

Eutamias borealis (Allen). Liard River Chipmunk. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 495 

Seiunis hudsonicus Erxleben. Husdon Bay Red Squirrel. Ni- 

paktam Tjik-rik. 
Sciuropterus sahrinus (Shaw). Hudson Bay Flying Squirrel. 
Peromyscus maniculatus borealis Mearns. Arctic White-footed 

Mouse. 
Evotomys gapperi athabascoe Preble. Athabaska Red-backed Mouse. 
Evotomys dawsoni Merriam. Dawson Red-backed Mouse. 
Lemmus trimucronatus (Richardson). Back Lemming. Ki-lan- 

mu'tak. 
Dicrostonyx nelsoni Merriam. Point Barrow Lemming. A-vin'- 

yak a-mirk-lirk. 
Microtus drummondi (Aud. and Bach.). Drummond Vole. 

A-viii-yak. 
Microtus (species undetermined, from Arctic coast, probably M. 

xanthognathus (Leach), M. macfarlani Merriam. 
Ondatra zihethicus spatulatus (Osgood). Northwest Muskrat. 

Ki-fa'luk. 
Castor canadensis Kuhl. Canadian Beaver. Ki'gi-ak. 
Zapus liudsonius (Zimm.). Hudson Bay Jumping Mouse. 
Erethizon epixanthum Brandt. Yellow-haired Porcupine. 

Kreng-ya'luk. I-lu-ko'tak. 
Lepus americanus macfarlani Merriam. Macfarlane Varying 

Hare. O-ka'lik. 
Lepus arcticus canus Preble. Keewatin Arctic Hare. 0-ka'- 

li-shugVuk. 
Order Carnivora — Carnivores. 

Lynx canadensis moUipilosu^ Stone. Northern Canada Lynx. 

Ni-tu'yak (Alaskan, Mackenzie River). Pi-tak'si-kok. 
Canis occidentalis (Richardson). Gray Wolf. A'ma-rok. 
Canis occidentalis alhus Sabine. Barren Ground Wolf. (Discuss 

Preble on bases of color.) 
Vulpes alascensis Merriam. Alaska Red Fox. Kai-yok'tok 

(N. Alaska). Auk-pi-lak'tok (Mackenzie River). 
"Cross Fox" variety — Kri-a-nrok (N. Alaska). Ki-a-ser-6- 

til'ik (Mackenzie River). 
"Silver" or "Black" — Ker-a-nek'tok (N. Alaska). Mag'?ok 

(Mackenzie River), 



496 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Blue Fox — Kai-a-ni-rak'tok (Colorado River). Ig-ra'lik (Mac- 
kenzie River). 
Alopex lagopus innuitus (Merriam). Continental Arctic Fox. 

Ti-ra-ga'ni-ok. 
TJrsus americanus Pallas. Black Bear. 

Ursus richardsoni Swainson. Barren Ground Bear. Ak'lak. 
Thalardos maritimus (Phipps). Polar Bear. Nan'nuk. 
Mephitis hudsonica (Richardson). Northern Plains Skunk. 
Lutra canadensis (Schreber). Canadian Otter. 
Latax lutris (Linnaeus). Gray Sea Otter. (Not observed.) 
Taxidea taxus (Schreber). Badger. 

Mustela vison ingens (Osgood). Alaska Mink. Ti-ri-ak'puk. 
Mustela rixosa (Bangs). Least Weasel. Nau-li-ak'. 
Mustela ardica (Merriam). Tundra Weasel. Ti'ri-ak. 
Maries americana actuosa (Osgood). Alaska Marten. Ka-vi-a'- 

tjak. 
Gulo luscus (Linn.). Hudson Bay Wolverine. Kap'rik (Alaska). 

Kap'vik (Mackenzie River). Kal'vik (Coronation Gulf). 
Order Pinnipedia — Sea Lions, Seals, etc. 

Callorhinus alascanus Jordan and Clark. Alaska Fur Seal. 

Odobenus obesus (Illiger). Pacific Walrus. Ai'vuk. 

Phoca hispida Schreber. Rough Seal. Na'tjirk. 

Erignathus barbatus (Erxleben). Bearded Seal. Ug-fuk (Alaska). 

Ug-yuk (E.). 
Order Insectivora — Insectivores. 

Sorex personatus. L Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Common Eastern 

Shrew. 
Sorex tundrensis Merriam. Tundra Shrew. Ug-fu'nak (Alaska). 

Ug-jii'nak (Mackenzie River). 
Order Chiroptera — The Bats. 

Myotis lucifugus (Le Conte). Little Brown Bat. 

Order Cetacea — Cetaceans 

Balcena mysticetus Linn. Arctic Bowhead Whale. Ak'virk (Alaskan 
Mackenzie, and Coronation Gulf). 
The Bowhead Whale, the largest animal of the Arctic regions, 
if not directly the most important animal, on account of being the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 497 

chief means of support of a number of Eskimo communities, has, 
through the large fleets of vessels engaged in the whaling industry, 
indirectly been the most responsible agent for bringing the white 
man's civilization into the western Arctic, with its concomitant effects 
upon population and fauna. Although whaling had long been pros- 
ecuted in the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean west of Point Barrow, 
the first ship wintered at Herschel Island in 1889-1890. Later other 
ships wintered at Baillie Island, Langton Bay, Cape Parry, and two 
small schooners even wintered as far east as Victoria Island. Whal- 
ing was prosecuted independently by Eskimos from Cape Prince of 
Wales, Point Hope, to Cape Smyth and Point Barrow, Alaska, and 
east of the Mackenzie, at Warren Point, Baillie Islands, Langton Bay, 
and other points, before the advent of white men. The Eskimos were 
accustomed to pursue the whale from their skin-covered umiaks and 
kill them with stone-headed lances, valuing the whale for its meat and 
blubber and not for the "whalebone" or baleen. Nowadays there 
is no Eskimo whaling east of Point Barrow, and the western Eskimos 
use modern weapons. The whaling industry by white men has be- 
come practically dead within the past few years. One ship and one 
gasoline schooner, the only vessels which whaled in the Beaufort Sea, 
killed twelve whales apiece during the summer of 1912, but the 
voyages were considered unprofitable on account of the unsaleability 
of bone. The largest number of ships which wintered at Herschel 
Island at one time was fourteen in 1893-1894. The largest catches 
are said to have been 69 whales by Captain Smith in the Narwhal, 
1893-1895 ; 67 whales by Captain Norwood in the Balcena in 1893- 
1895, and 64 whales by Captain Bodfish in the Beluga in a two-year 
voyage about the same time. At that time whales were frequently 
killed near Herschel Island and Baillie Islands, but now the}'' are 
much less seldom seen inshore. A good many Bowhead Whales are 
killed in the spring by the Siberian natives at their whaling stations 
at Indian Point, Plover Bay, and East Cape. Whalers say that in 
the spring the Bowheads do not follow the Siberian coast farther than 
East Cape, but strike across from there to Point Hope, Alaska, and 
follow up the American coast around Point Barrow, passing Point 
Barrow, going to the eastward from about April 20th to June 1st. 
After the Bowheads pass Point Barrow in April and May, little 
2k 



498 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

is known of their movements. Whalers are apt to be met with any- 
where in Amundsen GuU in July and August, as early as ships can get 
out of winter quarters. Whales are sometimes seen spouting off- 
shore in Franklin Bay early in June. In August, in the region be- 
tween Cape Parry and Banks Island, the whales usually seem to be 
coming south along the west side of Banks Island, and going west, 
although they often are seen in Franklin Bay until September. 
Following them up, the whalers usually find whales most abundant 
on the "offshore" or "pea-soup grounds" off Capes Dalhousie and 
Brown, where the water is rather shoal, eighteen to thirty fathoms. 
The whales often remain here for some time and if scared away, soon 
come back. Whales killed here sometimes have mud on their backs 
as if they had been rolling on a mud bottom, i.e., whales which are 
killed without sinking. A dead whale which sinks to the bottom 
often brings up mud as a matter of course. Bowheads have been 
chased into fresh water three fathoms deep near Pullen Islands, off 
the mouth of the Mackenzie River. No parasites are found on Bow- 
head Whales, like the barnacles and "lice" found on Right Whales 
and Humpbacks. 

The method of Bowhead whaling is to cruise about under sail, 
keeping a sharp lookout from the masthead during the whole twenty- 
four hours. Bowhead Whales are very easily frightened and are 
very seldom if ever seen from a steamship while the propellor is work- 
ing. Furthermore, after a whale is struck by a bomb, it is extremely 
infrequent for another whale to be seen in the same vicinity for an 
hour or more, even though there may have been many in sight before. 
When a whale is "raised," the ship lowers all its available whale-boats. 
Each boat usually has a ship's officer as boat header in the stern-sheets, 
a boat-steerer (harpooner) in the bow, and a crew of four oarsmen. 
A whale usually stays below the surface for a regular period, from 
twenty minutes to an hour or more, according to his individual 
peculiarity. When up, the whale moves slowly along, the top of 
back just above the water, sometimes just below, making a wake, 
every minute or two blowing up a white column of vapor to a height 
of from eight to twelve feet. After spouting several times the whale 
usually "turns flukes," raises his tail out of water, and dives down. 
After two or three risings, the boat-header can usually tell the rate 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 499 

of speed at which the whale is traveling, the direction of his course, 
and the time he is apt to stay below. The boat heads for the place 
of his probable reappearance, keeping a little to windward if possible. 
When the whale spouts again, the boat-header tries to run the boat 
directly across the top of the whale's head, the most favorable chance. 
As the boat passes over, the boat-steerer (harpooner) in the bow 
thrusts one or two tonnite (or sometimes black-powder) bombs into 
the whale's neck with the darting-gun. The darting-gun is a heavy 
lance-shaft with set-gun at tip. When the point of the harpoon 
enters, a stiff parallel wire explodes the eight-gauge cartridge which 
shoots the bomb into the whale. The handle is immediately dis- 
engaged, the barbed harpoon-head remaining in the wound, and 
attached to the lance-warp (rope), of which ten fathoms are kept in a 
box in the bow and one hundred or more fathoms in a tub in the boat. 
Sometimes a shoulder-gun is used after the darting-gun, if opportunity 
offers. The shoulder-gun is a heavy eight-bore, shooting a long 
feathered tonnite bomb with no warp attached. If struck fairly 
in the neck vertebrae, a whale is sometimes killed instantly with one 
shot, but sometimes eight or ten shots are required. The whale often 
tows a boat a long distance if only slightly wounded, and is sometimes 
lost by going under a large ice-field. As soon as the whale is " struck " 
by one boat, the other boats come up as soon as possible, and as the 
whale rises he is struck as often as possible. On small ships the 
whalebone baleen from the upper jaw is sometimes cut off in the water, 
but on the larger ships the upper portion of the whale's skull is cut 
off and hoisted on deck entire, and the bone removed later. Ordi- 
narily the practice of the Bowhead whalers in recent years has been 
to remove only the baleen, turning the carcass with its fifty or more 
barrels of oil, adrift. This is a most wasteful practice, but when 
"bone" was high in price, a single whale might be worth S10,000in 
bone, and the captains preferred not to spend a day saving a thousand 
dollars' worth of oil, and perhaps lose a possible second whale. The 
meat of the Bowhead is good, the young whale's flesh in particular 
being much like beef. The "blackskin," or muk-tok, as it is called 
by the Eskimo, is considered a great delicacy, being usually eaten raw 
by the Eskimo, and boiled fresh or pickled by the white whalers. 
At Point Barrow, Alaska, the "floe-whaling" is done principally in 



500 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Eskimo skin-umiaks, and the whalebone is cut out at the edge of the 
floe. A male which I saw killed August 23d, 1910, in Franklin Bay, 
was about 57 feet long, flukes 18 feet 4 inches across, and right fin 
or flipper 10 feet 4 inches around outer curvature. The whale 
yielded 2100 pounds of whalebone, the longest slabs (from middle of 
jaw) being about 11 feet in length. 

Delphinapterus catodon (Linn.). White Whale. Kil-la-lu'ak 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 
The White Whale or Beluga, commonly called "White-fish" by 
white men in the North and Killaluak by the Eskimo, occurs some- 
what irregularly at various points along the Arctic coast. It is 
generally pursued by the Eskimo only, who value the flesh and blub- 
ber highly and use the skin for making boot-soles, rawhide 
thongs, etc., and formerly for covering umiaks. One of the best 
hunting-grounds for the white whale is in the estuary of the Mac- 
kenzie, east of Richard Island, where the whales appear in large 
schools in July shortly after the ice breaks up. Eskimo from the 
whole Mackenzie region assemble here in July for the Killaluak 
fishery, and about two hundred were killed in July, 1909. The next 
year, 1910, only a small number appeared. The whales are pursued 
in whale-boats. The harpooners first strike the whale with a hand- 
iron, and after making fast in this way, the boat endeavors to get 
alongside the whale so that it can be shot in the head with a rifle. 
The water is shoal in this region, and the backs of the whales can 
usually be seen as they plow up the river. Eskimo say that some- 
times the Beluga may be killed with a rifle, but the body always sinks 
as soon as killed. Another well-known hunting-ground is at the north 
end of Richard Island, and still another at the "Whitefish Station" 
between Tent Island and Escape Reef, Mackenzie Bay. In 1908 
the fishery was unsuccessful at the latter place, and only two were 
caught. Beluga are said by the Eskimo to sometimes enter the 
Eskimo Lakes from Liverpool Bay. In the latter part of July and 
in August they are usually seen going steadily west, often plunging 
and splashing, showing half of the body out of water. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 501 

Order Ungulata — Hoofed Mammals 

Cervus canadensis (Erxleben). Canadian Wapiti. Elk. 

Mr. Pierre Mercredi, the Hudson's Bay Company trader at Fort 
Chipewyan who has lived in the country many years, says that the 
Elk never ranged farther north than Fort McMurray on the Atha- 
baska River. 
Odocoileus hemionus (Rafinesque). Mule Deer, 

Mr. Wm. Briggs, the Dominion Forest Fire Ranger from Atha- 

baska Landing to Fort McMurray, says that the Black-tailed Deer 

have come into this country during the last few years. 

Alces americanus Jardine. Eastern Moose. Tuk'tu-vuk (Alaskan, 

Mackenzie, and Coronation Gulf Eskimo). Ko-gon (Slavey 

Indian). 

The Moose is common throughout the timbered country all 
along the Mackenzie River, and has occasionally been seen north 
of the timber line near Richard Island. According to the opinion 
of old residents and to data collected by the expedition, the Moose 
is increasing all through the northern country as well as extending 
its range rapidly and noticeably. Owing to its solitary habits and 
the nature of its habitat, the Moose cannot be slaughtered wholesale 
as can the Caribou and the Musk-ox, and the northern Indians have 
decreased in numbers at such a rapid rate as to more than compen- 
sate for the increased killing power of their more modern weapons. 
Moose venture very rarely into the region of the lower Horton River. 
Mr. Joseph Hodgson, one of the oldest of Hudson Bay traders, says 
that in the early days, up to less than fifty years ago. Moose were 
very rarely seen east of the Mackenzie, and told us in 1911 that it 
was only within the past half-dozen years that Moose had been seen 
on the east side of Great Bear Lake. Moose are now fairly numerous 
on Caribou Point, the great peninsula between Dease Bay and 
McTavish Bay, Great Bear Lake, and on the Dease River, northeast 
of Great Bear Lake. A Coronation Gulf Eskimo from the region near 
Rae River (Pal'lirk) told us that he had seen two Moose (which he 
thought cows, from their small antlers) near the mouth of Rae River 
in 1909 or 1910. These Eskimo often hunt in summer down to 
Great Bear Lake and know the Moose from that region. Rae River 



502 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

flows into the southwestern corner of Coronation Gulf, and the Moose 
undoubtedly wandered here from the region around Great Bear Lake. 
Rangifer arcticus (Richardsons). Barren Ground Caribou. 
"Tuk'tu" (universal Eskimo name). Adult bull, Pag'nirk. 
Adult female, Kul'la-viik. Fawn, No'wak. 
With the possible exception of the Bowhead Whale, the Caribou 
is without doubt the most important animal of the Arctic. There is 
scarcely anything manufactured which can equal Caribou skin as an 
article of clothing ; in many districts the natives live for long periods 
almost exclusively upon the meat of the Caribou, while there are many 
vast sections of the land which could with difficulty even be explored 
without relying upon finding the herds of Caribou. The Caribou 
were formerly universally and abundantly distributed over all parts 
of Arctic Alaska and Canada, but the numbers have been enormously 
decreased nearly everywhere within the last twenty years. Until a 
few years ago the coastal plain of Arctic Alaska, from Point Barrow 
to the Mackenzie, was the pasture of vast herds. Only an occasional 
scattered band is now seen. As a consequence most of the Eskimo 
have been compelled by starvation to move out, notably from the 
Colville River region. The Caribou are practically extinct around 
Point Barrow, and our party in the year 1908-1909 found only a few 
between Cape Halkett and the Colville. We saw a herd of perhaps 
four hundred in the Kuparuk River delta (the only large band seen 
by anybody in northern Alaska that season) and other small bands as 
far west as Demarcation Point. Around the mouth of the Mackenzie 
the Caribou have practically disappeared, although stragglers are 
occasionally seen on Richard Island and in the Eskimo Lakes region. 
Few are now found on the Cape Bathurst peninsula, and only small 
numbers around Langton Bay and Darnley Bay. There are places 
in the interior of Alaska which are more favored. In the southern 
foothills on the Endicott Mountains, on one of the northern tribu- 
taries of the Yukon, beyond the ordinary range of the Indians or 
the white prospectors, I saw in 1908 as many as one thousand Cari- 
bou in a single herd. Farther east, the Caribou are much more 
plentiful. Victoria Island pastures great numbers in summer. 
These herds cross to the mainland south of Victoria Island as soon as 
Dolphin and LTnion Straits and Coronation Gulf are frozen over in the 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 503 

fall (in 1910, about November 8th-10th), returning north over the ice 
in April and May. Some Caribou are found all summer around Great 
Bear Lake and the Coppermine River. Large numbers winter on 
Caribou Point, the large peninsula between Dease Bay and Mc- 
Tavish Bay at the eastern end of Great Bear Lake, Here on the 
cold, calm days of midwinter the steam from the massed herds often 
rises like a cloud over the tops of the scattering spruce forests. Al- 
though a large number of Caribou come down into the Bear Lake 
woods, and go out on the Barren Grounds in spring, not all the Caribou 
seek the shelter of the woods in winter. Some Caribou are found in 
midwinter on the most wind-swept barrens and occur on almost any 
part of the Arctic coast at any season of the year. 

The Eskimo of the Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island region 
have no firearms and kill Caribou by driving a herd between long rows 
of rock monuments into an ambush or into lakes where the Caribou 
are pursued and speared from kayaks. Two or three stones or a 
bunch of turf placed on top of a rock two or three feet high, or even 
less, to resemble persons, form these little cairns, often extending for 
miles and converging in some valley or gulch. The Caribou ordinarily 
pay no attention to these monuments, but when alarmed by the sight 
of people, seem to become confused and do not venture to cross the 
lines of mounds. The custom is to have a person stationed here and 
there along the line, while others surround the herd of Caribou and 
start it moving towards the line. As the Caribou approach, the people 
along the line of rock monuments display themselves, throwing the 
herd into a panic and as the herd rushes along between the converging 
lines into the ambush where concealed bowmen have an opportunity 
to shoot the Caribou at very short range. On the Barren Grounds 
around Coronation Gulf these inuktjuit (inuk[man]-like) Caribou 
drives are found everywhere. But even in this most favorable 
Caribou country the older people say that in their youth the Caribou 
were much more 9.bundant than at present. 

The hunting of the Barren Ground Caribou, as it is practiced by 
white men and the Eskimo who use firearms, is in theory a very simple 
matter. The prime requisites are unlimited patience and much hard 
work. The field-glass or telescope is almost as necessary as the rifle, 
since the Caribou should be discovered at a distance. The herd is 



504 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

spied out from the highest knolls or elevations, and if the country is 
rough enough to afford even a little cover, the approach is com- 
paratively easy by hunting up the wind, as the Caribou do not see 
very far. Their powers of scent and hearing are very acute, however. 
On a broad, flat tundra plain, where there is no cover, and there are 
not enough hunters to approach from several sides, obviously the 
proper thing to do is to wait for the Caribou to browse slowly along 
and move on to more favorable ground for stalking. During the 
short days of winter this is often impossible and under any circum- 
stances is trying to the patience. The reputed superiority of the 
Eskimo hunter over his white confrere seems to be mainly in the 
former's willingness to spend unlimited time in approaching his quarry. 
The Great Bear Lake Indians often take advantage of the Caribou's 
frequent habit of circling around the hunter until certain of the dan- 
ger. They will sneak up as far as practicable, then come out into the 
open and run directly at the Caribou, which often stand stupidly until 
the hunter is very near or else circle blindly around until they get 
the scent of the hunter and make off. I have always found it much 
easier to approach a small herd than a large one, because there is 
always a straggler or two on the flanks of a large herd to give alarm 
before the main body is approached. 

For the purposes of making clothing, the skins of the Caribou are 
at their best from the 1st of August until about the 10th of Septem- 
ber. Later than that the hair becomes too long and heavy. To- 
wards the end of winter the hair begins to get loose, and by the last 
of April is so very loose that the skin is practically worthless. During 
June and July the Caribou usually have a more or less patchy appear- 
ance, due to bunches of loose, faded, old hair remaining in places. 
Summer skins are often badly perforated by the grubs of a species 
of bot-fly. Caribou skins are exceptional non-conductors of heat. 
Wlien a number of Caribou are killed during the short days of mid- 
winter, the Eskimo often skin only the legs, double the legs under 
the body, and pack soft snow around the carcass. I have seen many 
Caribou left out overnight at a temperature of —45° Fahrenheit, and 
lower, and the heat retained by the skin so that the body was warm 
and readily skinned the next day. 

The fawns, seldom more than one in number, are born between 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 505 

the 1st and 15th of June. Two young fawns taken near the 
Colville delta, Alaska, June 16th, 1909, were quite different in color, 
one being decidedly brown, with short, sleek coat; the other was 
whitish gray with very little "fawn" color, and hair longer and softer, 
more woolly in texture. No traces of spotting on either specimen. 
The Caribou seen east of the Coppermine River and on the south side 
of Coronation Gulf seemed to average much lighter in color than the 
Caribou found on Great Bear Lake or on the Arctic coast west of 
Cape Parry. With very few exceptions the Coppermine Caribou 
were very light, with legs nearly white. The heads of these Caribou 
appeared to be much shorter than those of the Great Bear Lake Cari- 
bou, with a noticeable fullness or convexity between forehead and 
nose, reminding one in some degree of the profile of a rabbit. The 
difference is not very noticeable on the skulls, the fullness of the face 
being largely due to the fuzziness of the whorl of hair on front of face. 

The old bull Caribou begin to shed their antlers by the first of 
January or earlier, and most of them have dropped them by the month 
of February. The young bulls and cows retain their antlers until 
May. On Caribou Point the old bulls herded together in winter, and 
in their antler-less condition presented a pitiably tame and defense- 
less appearance, in contrast to the bull Caribou's belligerent-looking 
autumn attitude. By the 10th of May the new antlers of the old 
bulls are about a foot long, with blunt, knobby ends. 

Many Eskimo claim to be able to pick out the fat Caribou from 
a herd by observing the shape of the horns. This is probably merely 
the ability to distinguish between the sexes in a herd at the different 
seasons. At Great Bear Lake in the fall, before the rutting season, 
the old bulls had the greatest quantities of fat. In midwinter all the 
bulls were poor, while the cows often had considerable fat. Towards 
spring the young bulls began to pick up a little fat, while the cows 
seemed to fall away as the calving season approached. The cows can 
usually be distinguished from young bulls by the relative slenderness 
of their antlers. Old bulls seldom have much fat before the end of 
the mosquito season. When the antlers are full grown, then they 
begin to pick up rapidly. The largest slab of back-fat which I have 
seen taken from a Caribou on the Arctic coast was from a bull killed 
near Langton Bay early in September, the fat weighing 39 pounds. 



506 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

A large bull killed by Mr. Stefansson on Dease River in October had 
back-fat 72 mm. in thickness (2| inches). Comparing the thickness 
of this with the Langton Bay specimen, the back-fat of the Dease 
River bull must have weighed at least 50 pounds. The thicker the 
back-fat of a Caribou is, the richer it is in proportion — the amount 
of connective tissue remaining the same, and the additional weight 
consisting of interstitial fat. . 
Bison bison athabasccs Rhoads. Wood Bison. 

According to the estimates made by Major W. H. Routledge, 
R.N.W.M.P., who was in charge of the Buffalo protection at Fort 
Smith in 1908, there are probably not more than three hundred left. 
The number of Buffaloes in the region is difficult to estimate, as they 
range in small scattered bands west of the Slave River, from Salt 
River on the south to Hay River on the north. This remnant of the 
once great herds is pretty thoroughly protected now, although the 
wolves are said to kill a good many. 

Ovibos moschatus (Zimmermann) . Musk-ox. U-min-miik (Es- 
kimo) . Et-jir-er (Slavey Indian, Great Bear Lake) . 

No living Musk-oxen have probably been seen in Alaska at a later 
date than 1860-1865, although horns, skulls, and bones in a good 
state of preservation are to be found in various places from Point 
Barrow to the Colviile River. None have been seen west of Liver- 
pool Bay within the past twenty-five years. Around Franklin Bay, 
Langton Bay, and the lower part of Horton River, Musk-oxen were 
fairly common until about 1897. 

The first vessel that went into Langton Bay to winter (fall of 
1897) saw Musk-oxen on the hills, looking from the deck of the ship. 
During 1897-1898 four ships wintered at Langton Bay, and over 
eighty Musk-oxen were killed, mainly by Alaskan Eskimo hunting 
for the ships. Some of the meat was hauled to the ships, but most 
of the animals were killed too far away for the meat to be hauled in, 
and the bulk of the robes were left out too late in the spring thaws, 
so that very little use was made of anything. Since that time no 
traces of living Musk-oxen have been seen in the region, either by 
natives who occasionally hunt there, or by our party during nearly 
three years. In March, 1902, a party of Alaskan Eskimo made an 
extended journey to the southeast and east of Darnley Bay and 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 507 

killed tv/enty-seven. This was without doubt the last killing of 
Musk-oxen by Eskimo west of Dolphin and Union Straits. 

In the summer of 1910 Mr. Stefansson and his Eskimo found 
numerous Musk-ox droppings of the previous winter around the Lake 
Immaernrk, the head of Dease River. We spent the greater part 
of the winter of 1910-1911 on the east branch of Dease River and 
eastern end of Great Bear Lake, but saw no recent signs of Musk-oxen. 
That same winter the Bear Lake Indians made an unsuccessful hunt 
to the northeast of Great Bear Lake. Two or three years before 
they had made a big hunt in this region and killed about eighty. In 
February or March, 1911, the Indians killed three Musk-oxen near 
the end of Caribou Point, the only specimens seen in the whole region 
that winter. Apparently the Musk-ox is seldom if ever found in the 
region of western Coronation Gulf around the mouths of Rae River, 
Richardson River, or the lower portion of the Coppermine River. 
Quite a number of Eskimo hunt in this region, and they say that the 
Musk-oxen are all farther to the east. Some old men in the Rae 
River region had never seen a Musk-ox. The number of Musk-oxen 
now living west of the lower Coppermine River is very small and 
probably confined to the rather small area of high, rocky barrens com- 
prised in the triangle whose apices are Darnley Bay, Coronation and 
the north side of Great Bear Lake. From all the information we 
could get from the Coronation Gulf Eskimo, Musk-oxen are seldom 
if ever seen near the mainland coast less than seventy-five miles east 
of the mouth of the Coppermine River. It seems probable from in- 
formation which Mr. Stefansson received from numerous groups of 
Eskimo in Coronation Gulf, Dolphin and Union Straits, and Prince 
Albert Sound, that no Musk-oxen at all are found in either the southern 
or central portions of Victoria Island (i.e. Wollaston Land, Victoria 
Land, Prince Albert Land). Some of these Eskimo remember of 
the former occurrence of the Musk-ox around Minto Inlet and Walker 
Bay, but say there are now none in that region. It is their belief, how- 
ever, that Musk-oxen are still found near the north coast of Victoria 
Island. Musk-oxen are said to be still common on Banks Island. 
The Musk-oxen are so readily killed, often to the last animal in a herd, 
that the species cannot hold its own against even the most primitive 
weapons, and the advent of modern rifles means speedy extinction. 



508 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Ovis dalli (Nehon). Northern Mountain Sheep. Imp'nak (Alaskan 
Eskimo). Lamb, during the first year, No'wak. Two-year- 
old, with short horns, Ki-ru-tai'lak. Adult female, Kul'la-vuk. 
Adult male, Ang-a-ti-shug-riik (literally big male). Slavey 
Indian name, Tho. 
The White Sheep probably never ranged east of the Mackenzie, 
although they are said to be still fairly common in the mountains 
on the west side of the river from Fort Norman to the west side of the 
delta. The Endicott Mountains, or that branch of the northern 
Rockies which runs northwest from the western edge of the Mackenzie 
delta, form a divide ten or fifteen miles from the coast west from the 
coast at Herschel Island and seventy-five or one hundred miles from 
the coast at the Colville, the largest river flowing into the Arctic 
in northern Alaska. Sheep were formerly quite numerous on the 
heads of nearly all the rivers on the Arctic side of the divide, at least 
as far west as the Colville. It is probable that until comparatively 
recent times, before whaling ships began to winter at Herschel Island 
in 1889, the sheep were not much hunted in this region. The popu- 
lation was sparse, and the Caribou were larger, more abundant, and 
more easily taken. The gradual extermination of the Caribou in 
northwestern Alaska, combined with other causes, has for many 
years induced Eskimo from the rivers at the head of Kotzebue Sound 
to move across to the Colville, at the same time that many Colville 
Eskimo have gradually moved eastward, occupying one mountain 
valley after another until the sheep became too scarce to support 
them. A considerable number of sheepskins have been sent west 
each year with the Cape Smyth natives who came east each year to 
barter white men goods for Sheep and Caribou skins. In my expedi- 
tion into the Endicott Mountains from October, 1908, to April, 1909, 1 
hunted sheep with the Eskimo on both sides of the Endicott Moun- 
tain divide, and found sheep much more common on the north side 
of the divide than on the south side, although the south side of the 
mountains is an uninhabited wilderness. On the Hula-hula River, 
which has a course of about forty-five miles in the mountains and 
about the same distance across the central plain, we found two 
families of Eskimo sheep-hunters. One of these Eskimo had in this 
small river valley killed thirty or thirty-five sheep from June to Au- 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 509 

gust, 1908, and thirty-seven from September, 1908, to May, 1909, 
subsisting with his whole family almost entirely on sheep meat. This 
man's clothing from head to foot was made of sheepskins, his tent of 
sheepskins, and even his snowshoes strung with sheepskin thongs. 
Many people in the north prefer the skin of the Mountain Sheep to 
Caribou for clothing. Although the outer hair of the Sheep is 
brittle, only the ends of the hairs break off, and the sheepskin never 
becomes wholly denuded, while the Caribou skin garment becomes 
bare in spots on very slight provocation. 

Although the rocky slopes where the sheep feed look pretty 
barren, the sheep manage to find enough to eat. The stomachs 
usually contain grass, and sometimes moss. The natives say the 
sheep do not browse on willows, although they often descend to the 
willows in the summer time. In winter the sheep usually keep to 
the higher ridges where the snow is less deep. They do not appear 
to paw the snow away, as it is seldom crusted hard, but browse 
through the snow, pushing it aside with the nose. Sheep are singu- 
larly unsuspicious of danger from above, although they are continu- 
ally on the alert for enemies from below. Their eyesight is almost 
telescopic, the scent and hearing equally acute, and it is practically 
impossible to approach them from below. The hunter therefore al- 
ways endeavors to work around some adjoining ridge or ascend some 
creek valley and approach them from above. In this manner, the 
native hunters sometimes approach within fifteen or twenty yards 
and kill several out of one band. The lambs are said to be born very 
early in the season, much earlier than the Caribou, while the snow is 
still on the ground. The natives told me that in summer the sheep 
sometimes go up on the ice-capped mountains when the mosquitoes 
get very bad on the lower ranges, but that they come down again 
towards evening, as there is no grass on the high mountain tops. 
Although the numbers of sheep have been greatly reduced, I believe 
that a few are still found near the head of every mountain river from 
the Colville to the Mackenzie. The natives hunt strictly for meat 
and skins, and the habitat of the sheep prevents the hunters in this 
particular region from picking up sheep as a side line to other game 
hunting and trapping. When a local influx of hunters cuts down the 
number of sheep beyond a certain limit in some mountain valley, 



510 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

pressure of hunger soon causes the people to move out. Word is 
passed along that the said river is starvation country, and an auto- 
matic close season affords the sheep a chance to recuperate. The 
Eskimo in the Endicott range occasionally capture a sheep by setting 
rope nooses or snares in the paths which the sheep make through the 
willow thickets while crossing from one side of a river valley to an- 
other. A few wolves are found on the sheep range, and I have seen 
wolf tracks following sheep's tracks high up into the mountains, so 
that probably a few are killed by Wolves. 

Order Rodentia — Rodents 

Marmota caligata (Eschscholtz). Hoary Marmot. Tjik'rik-puk, 
"big marmot" (Alaskan Eskimo). 

Common in the Endicott Mountains north to the edge of the 
foot-hills. A few skins are taken by the inland Eskimo, and sold 
under the name of "Badger." Eskimo east of the Mackenzie say 
that the animal is not found in their country, but know the species by 
name, from garments brought in by western Eskimo. 
Citellus 'parryi kennicotti (Ross). Mackenzie Spermophile. Tjik'- 
rik (Alaskan Eskimo). Tsik-tsik (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Common all along the northern coast of Alaska, in the Mackenzie 
delta, and east to Franklin Bay. Less common in the more rocky 
and stony country east of Franklin Bay. These Spermophiles are 
particularly abundant in sandy, alluvial river bottoms where the 
ground thaws earlier and to a greater depth, allowing the animals to 
dig their favorite roots and excavate their burrows more readily than 
on the frozen, moss-covered tundra. They feed principally upon the 
roots of various species of Polygonum, the "masu'" roots of the 
Eskimo, and are very fat in the fall, and for a short time after coming 
out of winter quarter. The bulk of the Spermophiles go into hiber- 
nation in the latter part of September, but a few are occasionally 
seen until the middle of October. They come out again about the 
middle of April. The flesh is eaten by the Eskimo, and the skins 
make very good warm garments. The males fight viciously among 
themselves, and most of the old males are badly scarred from their 
numerous battles. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 511 

Citellus parryi (Richardson). Hudson Bay Spermophile. Srik- 
srik (Coronation Gulf Eskimo). 

Mr. E. A. Preble (N. A. Fauna, No. 27, p. 160) has conventionally 
placed the line between the habitats of C. parryi and of C. p. kenni- 
cotti as the watershed between the Coppermine River and Great Bear 
Lake. The appearance and habits of the two varieties are similar, 
kennicotti being described as paler in color. The Spermophiles are 
very abundant in the sandy clay hills around the mouth of the Copper- 
mine, and at various places along the south side of Coronation Gulf, 
and form a large part of the food of the Copper Eskimo in May and 
June, in the interim after they abandon sealing and leave their snow 
houses on the ice, and before they go inland for the summer Caribou 
hunt. We saw no evidence of the presence of Spermophiles on 
southern Victoria Island, and the Eskimo say that they are not 
found on the island. 
Citellus franklini (Sabine). Franklin's Spermophile. 

This species was not observed farther north than the Edmonton 
and Athabaska Landing trail. 
Citellus tridecemlineatv^ (Mitchill). Thirteen-lined Spermophile. 

Number seen on the trail a few miles north of Edmonton, Al- 
berta, but none farther north. 
Eutamias borealis (Allen). Liard River Chipmunk. 

Observed at various points as far north as Smith's Portage, on the 
Slave River. 

Sciurus hudsonicus Erxleben. Hudson Bay Red Squirrel. Nipak- 
tam Tsik-tsik, "Spruce-tree Spermophile " (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Noted at various points along the Athabaska, Slave, and Mac- 
kenzie rivers, as far north as the mouth of Peel River below Fort 
McPherson. Rather rare at the northeast end of Great Bear Lake. 
Saw one in a spruce grove near the Dease River, March 9th, 1911 ; very 
active and noisy in spite of the cold weather. 
Sciuropterus sabrinus (Shaw). Hudson Bay Flying Squirrel. 

Mr. Harry W. Jones had in collection two young Flying Squirrels 
preserved in formalin, captured June 8th, 1908, in a nest in a spruce 
tree near Hay River, Great Slave Lake. They were apparently only 
a few days old, with hair very short, and eyes not yet opened. No 
other specimens were observed in the North. 



512 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Peromyscus maniculatus horealis (Mearns). Arctic White-footed 
Mouse. 

This species is very common on the Athabaska, Slave, and Mac- 
kenzie rivers, as far north as Fort Norman. Specimens were trapped 
at nearly all stopping places, usually in runways near fallen logs just 
within the line of Spruce and Balsam Poplar, above the line of Wil- 
lows and Alders on river banks. At all of the trading-posts they enter 
the dwellings and warehouses and become as great a nuisance as the 
common House Mouse does in civilized countries. 
Evotomys gapperi athabasccB Preble. Athabaska Red-backed Mouse. 

One specimen caught at Fort Chipewyan May 24th, 1908, in a run- 
way on a ledge of rocks near the shore of Lake Athabaska. 
Evotomys dawsoni Merriam. Dawson Red-backed Mouse. 

Eight specimens trapped at Fort Norman July 4th-8th, 1908, most 
of them in an old log house near the R. C. Mission. The species was 
not taken elsewhere. 

Lemnus trimucronatus (Richardson). Back Lemming. A-vi-nka 
(the generic name for mouse, among Alaskan as well as the Mac- 
kenzie Eskimo). 

In the Mackenzie delta and eastward this species is properly 
designated "A-mirk-lirk," or " Auk-pi-lak-tok a-mirk'lirk." Speci- 
mens which are apparently referable to this species were taken at 
various points along the Arctic coast from the Colville delta, Alaska, 
to Coronation Gulf, but the species was not very common anywhere. 
Dicrostonyx nelsoni Merriam. Point Barrow Lemming. Ki-lan- 
mu'tak, "one out of the sky" (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

The Eskimo have a common belief that the White Lemmings 
fall from the sky. The animals in the dusky summer pelage, with 
darker dorsal stripe, are called A-vi-nat or mice. Specimens were 
occasionally taken at various points from Flaxman Island, Alaska, 
east to Coronation Gulf, but were not seen in numbers at any time. 
Microtus drummondi (Aud. and Bach.). Drummond Vole. 

Specimens taken in house at Fort Norman, also occasionally 
in runways in the tall grass and spruce shrubs near the northern 
limit of trees south of Langton Bay ; also on the west side of Franklin 
Bay. 
Microtus macfarlani Merriam. Macfarlane Vole. Little Meadow 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 513 

Mouse. A-vi-nak (Alaskan and Mackenzie River Eskimo). 
A-vi-fia-ra'luk (Mackenzie River Eskimo). 

A large number of Mice were taken at Langton Bay from 1910 
to 1912. The sandspit at the harbor was covered with a mat of 
wire-like grass, which was intersected by a maze of mouse runways, 
and the Mice also extended their depredations into the provisions and 
skins which we stored in the old whalers' storehouse. These Mice 
have .not been thoroughly examined and compared with the types, 
but at least two species were found here, one of which is undoubtedly 
macfarlani. Specimens apparently referable to macfarlani were also 
taken on the mainland east of Richard Island. A few specimens of 
Mice in the collection from northern Alaska are still undetermined. 
During the year 1908-1909 Mice of all kinds were unusually scarce 
all along the coast of northern Alaska, while two years before they 
were said to have been excessively abundant. On that part of the 
coast, where stranded carcasses are rare, Mice seem to form the chief 
food of the White Foxes. The year when the Mice were scarce was 
also marked by an abnormal scarcity of Snowy Owls. 
Ondatra zibethicus spatulatus (Osgood). Northwest Muskrat, Ki- 
fa'-Iuk (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Common throughout the whole Mackenzie basin. Observed 
Muskrats in the west branch of Mackenzie delta nearly to Tent Island, 
and in the east branch up to Toker Point, both points being well 
north of the tree line. On the southeast end of Richard Island, 
September 17th, 1909, I killed twelve Muskrats in a grass-bordered 
slough channel. Several rat-houses here were built of heaped-up 
grass-stems, moss, and mud on the edge of open water ; all houses rather 
small, not over eighteen inches above water and two and a half or 
three feet across. 

Muskrats were fairly common in small lakes near Horton River, 
from ten to forty miles south of Langton Bay. In October, I saw 
several muskrat holes in the ice, two or three inches in diameter. 
They were covered by little bunches of grass on top of the ice en- 
circling the hole, and were kept open all the time. I saw only one 
rat-house near shore built up with top about one foot above water. 
Muskrats have become fairly common on the east side of Great Bear 
Lake within the past few years, according to Mr. Joseph Hodgson, 
2l 



614 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

a well-informed trader of the Hudson Bay Company. The Muskrat 
apparently does not go much east of the Coppermine River along the 
Arctic coast. Throughout the Indian and Eskimo country the Musk- 
rat is considered delicious eating. Mr. Maxfield Hamilton, the Hud- 
son Bay Company's agent at Smith's Landing, obtained an albino 
skin in the spring of 1908, the second one he had seen out of one or 
two hundred thousand rat skins handled. 

Castor canadensis Kuhl. Canadian Beaver. Ki'gi-ak (Mackenzie 
Eskimo) . 

I saw specimens taken in the east branch of the Mackenzie delta, 
nearly as far north as the tree line, and also near the mouth of Peel 
River. The Eskimo consider the broad, flat tail of the Beaver a 
great delicacy; it is somewhat fatty, and when boiled has a soft, 
gelatinous structure. Mr. Joseph Hodgson says that the Beaver 
have greatly extended their range east of the Mackenzie during recent 
years, in the region around Great Bear Lake. 
Zapus hudsonius (Zimm.). Hudson Bay Jumping Mouse. 

The only specimen observed in the North was picked up dead on 
the edge of the Indian village at the foot of the hill at Fort Norman, 
July 6th, 1908. 

Erethizon epixantkum Brandt. Yellow-haired Porcupine. Kreng- 
ya'luk, I-lu-ko'tok (Alaskan Eskimo, names used by the same 
people indiscriminately). 

Three specimens were killed in spruce timber on south side of 
Endicott Mountains, Alaska, in December, 1908, and February, 1908. 
The Eskimo say that Porcupines are very seldom seen north of the 
divide. One was said to have been killed on the Hula-hula River 
long ago, and another at Icy Reef, Alaska. They are seen more 
often on Firth River (near Herschel Island), but are not known by 
Eskimo east of the Mackenzie. 

Lepus americanus macfarlani Merriam. Macfarlane Varying Hare. 
0-kal'lik (Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

During certain years the Varying Hares or Rabbits are very nu- 
merous, while during other years they are almost lacking. During 
the winter of 1908-1909 only a very few scattering tracks were seen 
on either the north or south sides of the Endicott Mountains. In 
1909-1910, rabbits were very abundant in the willows of the northern 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 515 

Mackenzie delta, and numbers were seen on the low delta islands in 
June, 1910. Rabbits are said to have been very abundant near the 
last trees on the lower Horton River several years ago, but during 
three years, 1909-1912, which members of our party spent on this 
river, only two or three specimens all together were seen. Not ob- 
served east of Franklin Bay. 

Lepus arcticus canus Preble. Keewatin Arctic Hare. 0-kal'li- 
shug'joik (Mackenzie Eskimo). 0-kal'lik (Coronation Gulf). 
None observed west of Langton Bay, where an occasional speci- 
men was shot on the barren hilltops. Hares were more common at 
Cape Parry, where they seem to hide out on the rough sea ice in the 
daytime, and only go up on the land in the night-time to feed. We 
regularly saw numerous signs of Hares on the rocky, lichen-covered 
hilltops, but almost never saw any Hares. Tracks were fairly com- 
mon on the barren uplands on both sides of Horton River. Winter 
pelage white except for black-tipped ears. A specimen shot near 
Coronation Gulf, May 31st, 1911, had considerable gray on head and 
shoulders. One killed June 8th had bluish gray patches on head and 
neck, where the white hair had been shed, and another on June 17th 
had white only on back, ears, tail, and legs. 

Order Carnivora — Carnivores 

Lynx canadensis moUipilosus Stone. Northern Canada Lynx. 

Ni-tii'yak (Alaskan Eskimo). Pi-tak'si-kok (Mackenzie 

Eskimo) . 
The winter before I visited the Mackenzie delta Lynx were very 
abundant down to the coast, and the Mackenzie River Eskimo 
traded about two thousand of them. The next winter, 1908-1909, 
very few Lynx were seen in the Mackenzie delta, and in the Endicott 
Mountains, northern Alaska, we saw only a very few tracks. During 
the winter of 1909-1910 we were around Langton Bay and Cape 
Parry, out of the Lynx country, but the Mackenzie River Eskimo 
got only two or three skins that winter. None were seen around the 
east end of Great Bear Lake during the winter of 1910-1911, and we 
saw none in the timber on Horton River, where we spent most of the 
winter of 1911-1912. 



516 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

Canis occidentalis Richardson. Gray Wolf. A-ma-rok (Alaskan 
and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

The wolves of the Barren Grounds have been described as a 
separate form, the Barren Ground Wolf (Canis occidentalis alhus 
Sabine), on account of the supposedly lighter color of Wolves from 
that region. My experience has been that Wolves of every shade of 
color from black to almost white are found together on the Arctic 
coast from Alaska to Coronation Gulf. Wolves of anything near a 
pure white color are very rare. 

The typical Arctic wolf is light tawny yellowish in color, with a 
few black hairs intermingled along the median line of the back. The 
common Eskimo belief is that the white wolves are old wolves, but 
we have observed a dark old female wolf with white cubs. A speci- 
men taken on the Hula-hula River, Alaska, was nearly pure black — ■ 
head and face jet-black, tail somewhat fulvous, belly grayish. Other 
"black" wolves were seen at Langton Bay, Horton River, Great 
Bear Lake, and Coronation Gulf. An unusual specimen, a decrepit 
old male, was shot near Dease River — a sort of silvery gray, with 
white and black hairs mingled, like a "good" Cross Fox or "poor" 
Silver Fox. The "good wolf" of the particular shade prized by the 
western Eskimo for trimming clothing must be well-furred, with 
the hair long, the median portion of each hair whitish, and each hair 
black-tipped. When cut into strips, it should show : first, a dense 
layer of "fur" next to the skin, then a band of whitish, and a pe- 
ripheral band of black or dusky. Such a skin is prized more highly 
than any other, even more than the most fashionable shade of pale- 
yellow Wolverine fur. Wolves are found in greatest numbers where 
the Caribou are most abundant, and follow the herds continuously. 
A compact herd is seldom attacked outright, but stragglers are cut 
off and run down. The Caribou are swifter for a time, but the Wolf 
is tireless and seldom loses a Caribou which he has started. Large 
packs of Wolves are seldom seen in the regions we visited, four or 
five being about the limit. About fifty miles east of Coppermine 
I saw a female wolf which had been killed by Eskimo at her den 
with four cubs, June 3d, 1911. The cubs' eyes were still unopened. 
The old wolf was yellowish colored, the cubs umber brown. One 
cub was a runt, not much bigger than a Spermophile (C. yarryi), 
the other three were much larger. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 617 

Vulpes alascensis Merriam. Alaska Red Fox. Red Fox — Kai- 
yok'tok (Alaskan Eskimo), Auk-pi-lak'tok (Mackenzie Eskimo). 
Cross Fox — Kri-a-nrok (Alaskan Eskimo), Ki-a-ser-6-til-lik 
(Mackenzie Eskimo) . Silver or Black Fox — Ker-a-nek'tok 
(Alaskan Eskimo), Mag'rok (Mackenzie Eskimo). 
The Red Fox in its varying phases is only rarely found north of 
the northern limit of trees. A good many Cross Foxes, a few Silver- 
grays, and occasionally a Black Fox are taken in the Mackenzie 
delta. Occasionally a Silver Fox comes out on the coast ; a good 
specimen was caught near Cape Bathurst in 1911. Every possible 
shade of intergradation in color is found from the bright rufous 
Red Fox, through various shades of dusky cross markings on back, 
shoulders, and hips ; specimens with only traces of fulvous on shoul- 
ders; backs with silvery and black intermingled, and very rarely 
the jet-black. All phases have a prominent white tip to the tail. 
Very few "colored" foxes are found around the eastern end of Great 
Bear Lake, and practically none around Coronation Gulf. 
Alopex lagopus innuitus Merriam. Continental Arctic Fox. Ti- 
ra-ga'ni-ok (Eskimo from Bering Sea to Coronation Gulf). 
"Common almost everywhere along the Arctic coast, but seldom 
goes far inland in any numbers. The White Foxes are found to a 
large extent on the salt-water ice in winter, and Polar Bear tracks 
are very commonly followed by Foxes, which pick up a living from 
offal of Seals killed by the Bears. A stranded whale's carcass will 
usually attract large numbers of foxes. An Eskimo man and boy 
in our employ caught about one hundred and forty during the winter 
of 1910-1911 around Langton Bay, and another Eskimo at Cape 
Bathurst caught one hundred and ninety six White Foxes the same 
winter. The next winter the latter caught only two, nobody 
caught more than twenty, and few over six. The White Fox is the 
staple fur of the Arctic coast, and the common medium of exchange 
everywhere west of Cape Parry. In summer the White Foxes are 
bluish gray, maltese color on back, head dusky mixed with silvery 
white, belly dirty yellowish white. Skins rarely become "prime," 
i.e., pure white with long fur, before December 1st, and the hair 
usually begins to get loose by the last of March. The Eskimo fre- 
quently eat White Foxes, and consider the meat very good, particu- 



518 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

larly when it is fat. The White Foxes are fairly common at the 
edge of the Barren Grounds near east end of Great Bear Lake, and 
an Eskimo of our party caught about thirty during the winter of 
1910-1911. An Alaskan Eskimo trapping near the mouth of the 
Coppermine River the same winter caught nearly one hundred. 
The Hudson Bay Company's agent informed me that one White Fox 
skin was taken during the winter of 1907-1908, at Smith's Land- 
ing, and one at Fort Chipewyan. Several skins are usually taken 
at Fond du Lac (east end of Lake Athabaska) every winter. 

The Arctic Fox is much less suspicious than the Red, Cross, or 
Silver Foxes, and will enter almost any kind of trap. The common 
method of trapping is to cut a shallow hole in the snow, just deep 
enough for the open steel trap to lie below the level of surrounding 
snow. Then a slab of lightly packed snow, just hard enough to lift 
without cracking, is cut just large enough to cover the trap. This 
slab is laid carefully over the trap, and then shaved and smoothed 
with great care. The snow slab should be just thick enough to 
support its own weight and brittle enough to be easily broken when 
an animal steps on it. A few chips of blubber, fish, or meat are 
shaved off, and scattered loosely and carelessly over and around the 
vicinity of the trap — just enough to give a scent and cause the fox 
to hunt around until the trap is sprung. If a fox is caught by both 
feet, he is usually frozen to death by morning, or even if caught by 
one foot, if the night is cold. Foxes sometimes gnaw off a trapped 
foot, but only below the place where caught, and then probably 
after the foot is frozen and insensible to pain. Sometimes a little 
box-like snow-house is built over a trap, usually of four blocks of snow, 
three sides and roof, leaving one side open to the leeward. The 
bait is placed at the further end of the house so that the fox must 
step directly over the trap to get it. The White Foxes are said to 
have seven, eight, nine, or ten young at a birth. I examined one 
female which had ten embryos April 20th, 1910. The young become 
very tame if taken at an early age, and are extremely active and 
playful. 

Blue Fox — Kai-a-ni-rak'tok (Colville River Eskimo). Ig-ra'lik 
(Mackenzie Eskimo). 

The blue phase of coloration of the White Fox, known as "Blue 





-'«=- ' Vfe ' 



Jt 





Leaving our Winter Sheep-Hunting Camp, Hula-Hula River, Alaska, 
March, 1909. 2. Male Barren Ground Bear, Horton River, N.W.T. 
3. Head of Northern Mountain Sheep (Ram), Hula-Hula River, Endicott 
Mountains, Alaska, 1909. 4. Polar Bears Swimming at Sea near Cape 
Parry, August, 1911. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 519 

Fox," is pretty rare east of western Alaska. During the winter of 
1910 four Blue Foxes were taken in midwinter near Cape Parry. 
Two of the skins were maltese gray with ends of hairs washed with 
brownish; the other, considered the "best" skin, was dark brown, 
almost black, with scanty traces of bluish color. A specimen taken 
by one of our Eskimo off Cape Parry in February had back light 
slaty gray, fading posteriorly ; tail nearly white above, darker below ; 
head dark slaty blue ; under parts darker, washed with dull brownish. 
One taken near Toker Point, April 25th, was a very pale specimen, 
head and shoulders light brownish, sides slightly bluish, and tail 
nearly white ; in general, much like a midsummer White Fox. 
Ursus americanus Pallas. Black Bear. 

The Black Bear is very common along the Athabaska River, and 
we saw eight Bears in less than four hours of drifting on the river 
below the Grand Rapids, May 14th, 1908. This part of the Atha- 
baska has the reputation of being the best place for Black Bears in 
North America. They are seen most abundantly just after the ice 
goes out in the spring and they come down to the edge of the river to 
look for dead fish which have been pushed up by the ice. In the fall 
the tangled brushy slopes along the Athabaska are said to be much 
frequented by Black Bears which feed largely on blueberries at that 
season. It is, however, more difficult to see the Bears in autumn on 
account of the thickness of the underbrush. Black Bears are said 
by the Indians to be fairly common around Great Bear Lake and 
occasionally north to the Mackenzie delta. 

Ursus richardsoni Swainson. Barren Ground Bear. Ak'lak (Es- 
kimo name for Brown Bear from Bering Sea to Coronation Gulf). 

Brown Bears, or Grizzlies, are found sparingly throughout the 
Arctic mainland from western Alaska to Coronation Gulf. There are 
undoubtedly two or three races or species in this region, but, owing 
to lack of specimens from important localities and lack of time for 
critical examination of the material at hand, I am obliged to nomi- 
nally refer to the Arctic Brown Bears under the above heading. In 
northern Alaska they do not appear to be very common on the north 
side of the Endicott Mountains, and seldom, if ever, come out on the 
coastal plains. The inland Eskimo occasionally kill specimens and 
often use the skin for a tent door. I saw the skins of two which were 



520 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

killed on the Hula-hula River, in October, 1908, by a Colville River 
Eskimo named Auktel'lik. Auktel'lik told me he had killed forty- 
four Aklak in his time, and that only two of the lot came towards 
him and tried to attack him. From what I could learn he had not 
hunted very far west of the Colville or at all east of the Mackenzie. 
Most Eskimo, however, speak with much greater respect of the 
pugnacity of Aklak than of Nannuk (the Polar Bear) and are much 
more cautious about attacking him. On July 3d, 1912, Mr. Frederick 
Lambart, Engineer on the Alaska-Yukon Boundary Survey, shot a 
Brown Bear on the Arctic slope of the mountains on the 141st me- 
ridian, about forty-five miles from the Arctic Ocean at Demarcation 
Point. From three photos of the dead Bear, it appeared to be of the 
long-nosed type, with a pronounced hump on the shoulders. Mr. 
Lambart informs me that this bear has been examined by Dr. C. 
Hart Merriam and declared to be a new species hitherto undescribed. 
In the Mackenzie delta tracks of Brown Bears are occasionally seen, 
but the bears are seldom killed, owing to the impracticability of 
hunting them through the dense underbrush on the islands in summer. 

I have been warned many times by natives against shooting at a 
Barren Ground Bear unless from above — as a wounded bear has 
greater difficulty in charging uphill. So far as our experience goes, 
however, the Barren Ground Bear is an inoffensive and wary brute, 
preferring to put as much ground as possible between himself and 
human society. I saw but one unwounded bear come towards me, 
but as he did not have my scent his advance was perhaps more 
from mere curiosity than from hostility. As the bear was on the 
uninhabited coast between Cape Lyon and Dolphin and Union 
Straits, and he had probably never seen human beings before, this 
inference seems plausible. Wounded bears are another story, of 
course, and it is generally admitted that the Barren Ground Bears 
are tougher or more tenacious of life than the Polar Bears. 

We found the center of greatest abundance of the Barren Ground 
Bears in the country around Langton Bay and on Horton River, not 
more than thirty or forty miles south from Langton Bay. One was 
killed at Cape Lyon, and another on Dease River east of Great Bear 
Lake. Li this region our party killed about twenty specimens, most 
of which were obtained on our dog-packing expeditions in early fall. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 521 

The Bears here showed two very distinct types, which for convenience 
we designate as the long-snouted and short-snouted types. The 
skulls are readily separated on this basis. It is rather hard to distin- 
guish them by color, as late summer skins are usually much bleached 
out. In general the long-snouted Bears were inclined to a reddish 
brown cast of color (sometimes almost bay color), while the others 
were often very dark — dusky brown, with tips of hairs on dorsal 
surface light grayish brown on fulvous, sometimes with tips a faint 
golden yellowish tint. The Barren Ground Bears go into hibernation 
about the first week of October and come out early in April while 
the weather is still very cold. 

While ascending the Horton River we saw at intervals the nearly 
fresh tracks of three Barren Ground Bears on December 29th, 1910, 
and January 1st, 1911, going along the river and over the shortest 
portages, at least forty miles in approximately a straight line. 
Neither the Eskimo or the Slavey Indian who were with us had ever 
before seen evidences of Brown Bears out of their holes in midwinter. 
They seem to be nearly as fat on their first emergence from their long 
sleep as in the fall, but speedily lose weight, and early summer speci- 
mens are invariably poor. This is natural from the nature of their 
food, which is to a large extent vegetable. Although the Bear's 
native heath is often conspicuously furrowed in many places by the 
unearthed burrows of Arctic spermophiles (Citellus parryi or C. p. 
kennicotti) I believe that the Bear's search is more for the little mam- 
mal's store of roots than for the little animal itself. The Bear's 
stomach is much more apt to contain masu roots {Polygonum sp.) 
than flesh. A bear must needs be very active to catch enough sper- 
mophiles above ground in spring and early summer, and if carcasses 
are not to be found, the Bears evidently suffer most from hunger at 
this season, when they can neither dig roots for themselves in the 
frozen ground nor dig out the spermophiles and their caches. One 
specimen was killed by an Eskimo of our party on Dease River, east 
of Great Bear Lake, after the Bear had gorged himself on a cache of 
Caribou meat, having more than fifty pounds of fresh meat in his 
stomach. A few Bears were met with in the Coppermine country, 
but throughout the Coronation Gulf re^on they are apparently rare. 
The Eskimo say that the Aklak is not found on Victoria Island. 



522 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

The fact that the Barren Ground Bears seem to always have at 
least two cubs at a birth, that old bears are often seen followed by 
two young cubs and one yearling cub, and that we never saw more 
than one yearling cub accompanying its mother, is evidence that 
there must be considerable mortality among the cubs in the first 
year, probably during the second spring. The new-born cubs, of 
course, are nursing in the spring, while the older cubs presumably 
have to depend upon their own foraging. Otherwise these Bears 
have practically no enemies besides man. As there is little market 
for their skins, neither Eskimo nor Indians make any special effort 
to hunt them, the specimens obtained being in general upon summer 
Caribou hunts. 

Thalardos maritimus (Phipps). Polar Bear. Nan'nuk (all Eskimo 
dialects). 
The Polar Bear or White Bear is a circumpolar cosmopolitan, 
although seldom found very far from the sea ice. In winter these 
bears are apt to appear anywhere along the coast, but in summer 
their occurrence depends largely upon the proximity of pack ice. 
Along the Arctic coast of Alaska, east of Point Barrow, the species 
is not very abundant, and the same may be said of the coast east and 
west of the Mackenzie delta. Numbers are annually killed near 
Cape Bathurst. The Polar Bears seem to be most abundant around 
Cape Parry and the southern end of Banks Island, very rarely passing 
through Dolphin and Union Straits, into Coronation Gulf. Around 
Cape Parry, in August, 1911, we saw fourteen Bears within two days 
roaming about the small rocky islands, evidently marooned when 
the ice left the beach. They are often seen swimming far out at 
sea. While whaling about twenty miles off Cape Bathurst (the 
nearest land) and about five miles from the nearest ice mass, we saw 
a Polar Bear which paddled along quite unconcernedly until he 
winded the ship, then veered away, heading out toward the ice pack. 
Shortly before Christmas an officer from the schooner Rosie H., with 
a party of Eskimo, killed a female and two newly born cubs in a 
hole in the snow near the mouth of Shaviovik River, west of Flaxman 
Island. It was said to be unusual for a Polar Bear to have cubs so 
early in the winter. 
Mephitis hudsonica (Richardson). Northern Plains Skunk. 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 523 

In 1908 I saw one skin traded from Indians at Point Brule below 
Fort McKay on the Athabaska River, but did not notice skunk skins 
farther down the river. 
Lutra canadensis (Schreber) . Canadian Otter. 

A few skins are taken annually around Fort McPherson. Mr. 
Joseph Hodgson informed me that the Otter is fairly common at the 
west end of Great Bear Lake and is occasionally taken at the east 
end of the lake. Johnny Sanderson told me that he had seen Otter 
"slides" near the east end of Great Bear Lake in the winter of 1910. 
Taxidea taxus (Schreber). Badger. 

Mr. Prudden, the Hudson Bay Company's trader at Calling 
River on the Athabaska River, Alberta, had skins of two Badgers. 
He told me that he killed one Badger himself near the river. The 
natives say that the Badger is very seldom seen north of there. 
Mustela vision ingens (Osgood) Ti-ri-ak'puk, "big weasel " (Alaska 
and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

A few Mink tracks were seen on the Hula-hula River near the 
entrance to the north side of Endicott Mountains. Large numbers 
are taken by the Eskimo who winter in the Mackenzie River delta 
pretty well inside the northern limit of trees. We took no specimens 
anywhere. 

Mustela arcticus (Merriam). Tundra Weasel. Ermine. Tfri-ak 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

Generally distributed along the Arctic coast from Alaska to Cor- 
onation Gulf, but not very common anywhere. More common in- 
land, particularly in the Mackenzie delta. A large number of the 
Eskimo of the Coronation Gulf region habitually wear an ermine 
skin suspended from the back of the coat, as a charm against sickness 
or for luck in hunting. 

Maries americana actuosa (Osgood). Alaska Marten. Ka-vi-a'tjak 
(Alaskan and Mackenzie Eskimo). 

A few skins are taken by the Eskimo in the Mackenzie delta 
every winter. The Marten is very variable in numbers from year to 
year at the various northern posts, its abundance depending largely 
upon the relative abundance of Mice, Rabbits, etc., upon which 
it feeds. The winter of 1910-1911 was said to be a poor year at 
Great Bear Lake. The best catch was made by a white trapper who 



524 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

caught thirty. Very few Marten are ever caught at the east end of 
Great Bear Lake. Mr. Timothy Gaudetts, Hudson Bay Company's 
trader at Fort Wrigley, told me that at old Fort Wrigley in 1896-1897 
he traded four hundred Marten skins from forty-six Indians. In 
1908 only about twenty Indians were trading at the post. 
Gulo luscus (Linn.). Hudson Bay Wolverine. Kap'rik (Alaska 
Eskimo). Kap'vik (Mackenzie Eskimo). KalVik (Corona- 
tion Gulf). 
The Wolverine is rather rare in northern Alaska, but is occasionally 
seen in the mountains. In northern Canada the Wolverine is found 
everywhere up to the northern limit of trees and in many localities goes 
far outside of the trees. Wolverines frequently come out on the 
coast of Franklin Bay, and they are fairly common on the south side 
of Coronation Gulf. Mr. Stefansson brought back part of a Wolverine 
skin from Victoria Island, which the owner said was taken near the 
east end of Prince Albert Sound. The western Eskimo, from Cape 
Bathurst to Bering Sea, consider Wolverine fur to be an essential part 
of the trimming on their garments, particularly a fringe of Wolverine 
fur around the rim of the hoods of both men and women. The skins, 
which are of the fashionable shade with a large area of light yellowish 
or straw-colored hair, long hair with thick under fur, are very highly 
prized and command a price in the local Eskimo trade many times 
its fur value in civilized markets. The dark-colored Wolverine skins 
are not very highly valued by the Eskimo. The Coronation Gulf 
and Victoria Island Eskimo do not use Wolverine skin to trim their 
clothes, and the skins are usually made into bags. The Wolverine is 
universally execrated throughout the North as an inveterate and tire- 
less cache-robber. Hardly any kind of cache can be made strong 
enough to keep out a Wolverine if he has plenty of time to work undis- 
turbed ; for the animal is strong enough to roll away heavy stones 
and logs, gnaw through timbers, climb to elevated caches, and ex- 
cavate buried goods. The pestiferous brute also has a penchant for 
lugging away and hiding articles which he has no apparent use for. 
Members of our party lost a shot-gun which was hung on a tree and a 
spy-glass and other things from a cached sled-load, all carried away by 
Wolverines. At Langton Bay a Wolverine ate a round hole through 
two plank doors to get into meat which we had stored in the old ice 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 525 

house. On attaining entrance to a food cache the animal will often 
remain until all the food is consumed. The most nearly Wolverine- 
proof cache I have seen was constructed by an Indian near Great 
Bear Lake. It was constructed by finding four trees in suitable 
position to form upright posts at the corners of the cache and cutting 
them off ten or twelve feet from the ground. The posts were notched 
on the inner sides to support horizontal beams, and logs laid across to 
form a floor, projecting two or three feet beyond each end. The logs 
forming the sides of the box were notched to receive end pieces of 
short logs. When filled up, the cache was roofed with a layer of 
heavy green logs three or four deep, too heavy for a Wolverine to 
move and too deep to gnaw through if he succeeded in getting on top. 
The uprights are stripped of bark and made as smooth as possible. 
If a Wolverine succeeds in climbing the upright posts, the projecting 
ends of the floor timbers prevent him from getting around to the top 
of the cache. Having no foothold, he cannot work at the bottom or 
sides of the cache, and consequently one thickness of timber suffices 
for these. 

The Indians and Eskimo and most white men residing in the 
North generally come to look upon a certain amount of the depreda- 
tions by Wolverines as unpreventable, fated, and like the annoyance 
of mosquitoes are taken as a matter of course The ordinary method 
of capture is by heavy steel traps, but log or stone dead-falls are com- 
monly used. 

Order Pinnipedia — Sea Lions, Seals, etc. 

Callorhinus alascanus Jordan and Clark. Alaska Fur Seal. 

There are various reports current of Fur Seals having been oc- 
casionally seen or captured to the east of Point Barrow years ago, but 
I was not able to verify any actual places or dates. The occurrence 
of the species in the Arctic Ocean is certainly only casual. 
Odobenus ohesus (Illiger). Pacific Walrus. Ai'vuk (Alaskan and 
Mackenzie Eskimo). 

The walrus is fairly common to the westward of Point Barrow, 
but only casually comes east to that point. A walrus was killed 
several miles inland at Point Barrow during the winter of 1908-1909. 



526 MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 

It had probably entered a lagoon and been stranded. One was killed 
at Herschel Island in 1911, and Mr. E. de K. Leffingwell informs 
me that he found a walrus carcass on Cross Island, a little east of 
the Colville River, in 1910, and saw two live Walrus on a sandspit off 
mouth of Shaviovik River, west of Flaxman Island, Alaska, in 1911. 
Mr. Roderick MacFarlane records Walrus east of the Mackenzie, but 
recent records from east of the Mackenzie are rare and doubtful. 
Phoca hispida Schreber. Rough Seal. Na'tjirk (Alaskan, Mac- 
kenzie, and Coronation Gulf Eskimo). 

Fairly common everywhere along the coast from Bering Sea to 
Coronation Gulf. The western Eskimo occasionally catch seals 
in nets set under the ice, but by far the most common method is to 
shoot them with rifles from the beach or from boats in summer, or 
along the edge of the ice floe or tide cracks in winter. The Corona- 
tion Gulf and Victoria Island Eskimo live almost exclusively on 
seals in the winter. They find the seal's breathing-hole by the aid 
of dogs, and wait at the hole for the seal to come up to breathe, when 
they kill it with a spear. In all districts the Eskimo depend largely 
upon the blubber of the seal for their fatty food, even the inland 
Alaskans being obhged to trade for a few "pokes" of blubber oil 
annually. The summer water boots of the Eskimo are practically 
always made of sealskin, usually with soles of the large bearded 
seal's skin or the skin of the white whale. The seal oil is usually kept 
in pokes — bags made of the skin of the seal removed intact and 
turned so as to be impervious to oil. Seals killed in summer usually 
sink quickly, but after the last of September a majority of the seals 
shot float until they can be recovered. An average seal of this species 
weighs from 125 to 175 pounds. A very large male shot at Cape 
Parry, December 12th, 1910, measured 65 inches in length and great- 
est girth 54 inches, weight about 200 pounds. 

Erignathus harbatus (Erxleben). Bearded Seal. Ug'fUk (Alaskan 
Eskimo). Ug\iik (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

The bearded seal is considered to be quite rare along the north 
coast of Alaska, east of Point Barrow, although fairly common to the 
south and west of Point Barrow. We have observed the species 
rarely at Herschel Island, Baillie Islands, and Franklin Bay, but it is 
nowhere common west of Darnley Bay. Around Cape Lyon bearded 



MY LIFE WITH THE ESKIMO 527 

seals were numerous, but the region of greatest abundance seemed 
to be in Dolphin and Union Straits. We saw numbers here in sum- 
mer, and natives from this section say that they sometimes see ten 
at a single hole on the ice, basking in the sun in the warm spring days. 
Farther east in Coronation Gulf the Bearded Seals are less common. 
The Eskimo east as far as Cape Bathurst consider the skin of the 
Bearded Seal as almost indispensable for boot-soles and umiak- 
covers and for cutting into heavy rawhide rope. The skins of six 
or seven Ugyuk will cover an umiak (skin canoe) thirty feet or more 
in length. The animal may weigh from five to eight hundred pounds. 

Order Insectivora — Insectivores 

Sorex personatus I. Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Common Eastern 
Shrew. 

Shrews, probably of this species, are reported commonly at many 
posts along the Mackenzie. Mr. Henry Frazer, a trader at Fort 
Norman, said that Shrews were very abundant in his storehouse 
and did considerable damage, gnawing into any animal substances, 
such as bacon, skins, furs, etc. Although I kept a number of traps 
set I could not catch any specimens along the river, although later 
I took specimens in the Mackenzie delta which appear to be yerso- 
natus. 

Sorex tundrensis Merriam. Tundra Shrew. Ug-ru'nak (Alaskan 
Eskimo). Ug'yu-nak (Mackenzie Eskimo). 

This species is apparently generally distributed all along the 
Arctic coast, but is not common anywhere. Specimens were taken 
in the Endicott Mountains, Alaska, Mackenzie delta, Cape Bathurst, 
and Horton River, south of Langton Bay. 

Order Chiroptera — The Bats 

Myotis lucifugus (Le Conte). Little Brown Bat. 

Among a few small mammal skins, collected at Hay River at 
west end of Great Slave Lake in spring of 1908, Mr. Harry W. Jones 
had one Little Brown Bat. We saw no Bats at any place on the 
Mackenzie River during the summer of 1908, or elsewhere in the 
North. 




A., SHOWING THE ROUTE OF THE STEFANSSON-ANDERSON EXPEDITION, 1908 




THE ARCTIC COAST OF ALASKA AND NOBTHWESTERN CANADA, SHOWING THE ROUTE OF THE STEFANSSON-ANDERSON EXPEDITION, 1908- 



r C L I N T O C K 



C H A N N E L 

]edrikBhald Bay 




Aulativigyuak 
, Point 



Swatfca Bay I 

Simpson aro^T^.O^^kJ^y'^ 




Williami Engraving Co., New York 



O NAMES, BY V. STEFANSSON 



Mean Scale — I : 4,500,000 




VICTORIA ISLAND AND ADJACENT REGIONS, WITH APPROXIMATE ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. AND ESKIMO NAMES, BY V. STEFANSSON 



MeimScale—l : 4,500,000 



INDEX 



Adventures and incompetence, theory of, 
43, 164-165, 343. 

Agricultural products at Fort Providence 
and to the north, 26. 

Akowak, Point Barrow Eskimo, 94. 

Akpek, Alaskan helper, 70-71, 73, 81, 82, 
83, 98, 99, 101. 

Alaska, character of coastal plain of 
northern, 65-66. 

Alexander, wrecked whaling vessel, 120. 

Alingnak, Baillie Islands Eskimo, 362-363. 

Alphabet, experience with Eskimo and the, 
427-429. 

Alualuk, ex-shaman, 371, 372-373, 424. 

Alunak, Victoria Island Eskimo, 286. 

Amundsen, Captain, meeting with, at 
Herschel Island, 3 ; relics of, at King 
Point, 37 ; tribute by, to Hubert 
Darrell, 344. 

Anderson, John, trapper, 369. 

Anderson, Matthew, 369, 370, 371, 372. 

Anderson, Rudolph M., joins author in 
expedition to the Eskimo, 5-6 ; arrival 
of, at Fort Macpherson, 33 ; investiga- 
tions carried on by, in Alaska, 69 ; 
experiences of, in Arctic Alaska, 70 ; 
rejoins author at Flaxman Island, 101 ; 
mentioned, 113, 114, 258, 259, 305, 306, 
312, 320, 336, 339; suffers attack of 
pneumonia at Cape Parry, 144-146 ; 
makes trip back to Herschel Island, 
153 ff. ; junction with author, at Lang- 
ton Bay, 233 ; makes Bear Lake trip, 
233-236 ; work of, about Coronation 
Gulf, 259; at Coal Creek camp, 339, 
354, 359 ; left by author at Langton 
Bay, 368 ; report by, on natural history 
collections of the expedition, 436-527. 

Anderson, Thomas, Hudson's Bay Com- 
pany official, 33-34. 

Archaeological excavations, difficulties at- 
tending, 313-314 ; at Langton Bay, 
328-329, 330-332; at Cape Smythe, 
387-388. 

Arctic Red River, Fort, 29. 

Arey, Gallagher, 117. 

Arey, Ned, 68, 100, 117, 380-381. 

Arkilinik River, 250, 251 ; Eskimo of the, 
285. 



Athabasca Lake, arrival at, 16. 

Athabasca Landing, 7. 

Athabasca River, voyage down the, 7 £f. ; 
running rapids on the, 8-10 ; Grand 
Rapids of the, 12, 14-15 ; size of, 16. 

Atkinson Point, visit to, 370-372. 



Back, Cape, 301, 302. 

Baillie Islands Eskimo, 362-363, 364-367. 

Balcena, whaling vessel, 497. 

Ballinger, Captain J. G., of revenue 
cutter Bear, 389. 

Banks Island, 3, 4 ; possibility of exist- 
ence of Eskimo on, 4 ; trip to, aban- 
doned on account of uninhabited state 
in summer, 281 ; death of people once 
resident in, 288, 289-290; musk-oxen 
on, 507. 

Barren Ground, caribou hunting in the, 
135 ; crossing of, on round trip to 
Franklin Bay from Dease River, 228 £f., 
234-236; caribou of the, 502-506; 
wolves of the, 516 ; bears of the, 519- 
522. 

Basil Hall Bay, visit to, 205. 

Bathing, customs as to, among Christian- 
ized Eskimo, 375-377, 415. 

Bathurst, Cape, visit to, 369. 

Bats, absence of, in the north, 527. 

Beachy Point, 64. 

Bear, revenue cutter, voyage to Nome on, 
389. 

Bearded seals, 267-269, 526-527. 

Bear Lake. See Great Bear Lake. 

Bear Rock, in Mackenzie Valley, 28. 

Bears, signs of, near Athabasca Lake, 16 ; 
in Eskimo folklore, 57-58 ; hunting 
of, along Colville River, 74 ; adven- 
tures with polar, 126, 165-167, 311; 
Barren Ground grizzly, 127, 335 ; 
grizzly, at Langton Bay, 127, 129, 333, 
334-335 ; Dr. Anderson's notes on, 
519-522. 

Beaver, the Canadian, 514. 

Bell Island, Rae's, 304-305, 306, 307, 312. 

Beluga, whaling ship, 47, 497. 

Belvedere, whaling ship, 47, 119 n., 312, 
341. 

Bent, A. C, 456, 485. 



2m 



529 



530 



INDEX 



Bernard, Captain Joseph, 258, 259, 260, 
305, 312, 361, 369. 

Bexiey, Cape, deserted village at, 168, 
279. 

Beyts, Inspector, 378. 

Birds, Arctic, 385 ; Dr. Anderson's notes 
on, 456-494. 

Bishop, Louis P., 456, 457, 485. 

Blind man, story of, at Simpson Bay, 271- 
273 ; at Clouston Bay, 295. 

Blizzard, course to follow when caught in 
a, 155-156 ; hunting caribou in a, 163. 

Blond Eskimo, discovery of, 173 ; first 
meeting with the, 190-192 ; description 
of, 192-194; form of heads of, 194- 
195 ; early references to existence of, 
by Arctic explorers, 199-200 ; possibil- 
ity of descent of, from Scandinavian 
colonists of Greenland, 200-201 ; futil- 
ity of various explanations of, 201-202. 

Blood feuds amiong Eskimo, 365-366. 

Bloody Fall, Coppermine River, 208-209 ; 
passage of, on ice ledge, 209 ; return 
passage of, 243. 

Blue fox, the, 518-519. 

Boas, Franz, facial indices for Eskimo by, 
194-195 ; cited, 284. 

Bodfish, Captain, 497. 

Boulders of ice, formation of, 383. 

Bowhead, whaling ship, 47, 48. 

Bowhead whale, taking of a, 119. 

Bowhead whales, 496-500. 

Brabant, Hudson's Bay Company official, 
34. 

Bray, Herbert, 12-13. 

Bremner, fellow-voyager on Athabasca 
River, 12. 

Briggs, William, 501. 

Brock, R. W., 441. 

Brower, Charles D., 45, 46, 387; profi- 
ciency of, in Eskimo tongue, 85. 

Brown, Jessie, 33. 

Buffalo, west of Smith Landing, 19-20 ; 
destruction of caribou compared with 
that of, 49 ; number of, and range, 506. 

Bumblebees, notes on, 448-449. 

Bumpus, Dr. Herman C, 4. 

Bumpus, Mount, Victoria Island, 276. 

Burning clifJs, east of Cape Bathurst, 439. 

Burt, Charles H., 377. 



Cameron, Agnes Deans, at Fort Macpher- 

son, 33. 
Canadian Northern Railway, extension 

to Edmonton, 6. 
Cape Bexiey Eskimo. See Dolphin and 

Union Straits Eskimo. 
Cape Smythe, village of, 45 ; population 



of, 66 ; two months' stay at, 85-94 ; 
visit to, on return trip, 386-389. 

Cape Smythe Whaling and Trading Com- 
pany, 45, 85. 

Cardinal, Louis, 377. 

Caribou, about Bear Lake, 29, 219, 221- 
222, 236 ; practical extinction of, in 
Arctic Alaska, 48-49, 502; band of, 
at Oliktok, 64-65 ; skins of, sent to 
American Museum of Natural History, 
New York, 65 ; depopulation of north- 
ern Alaska due to disappearance of, 66, 
67 ; hunting in Colville River district, 
73,74,114; Eskimo prayers for, 81- 
82 ; large herd of, east of Kuparuk 
River, 116; at Langton Bay, 127, 128, 
155, 156 ; in Horton River district, 130, 
135, 138, 139, 141-142, 239-240; near 
Point Pierce, 163-164 ; stalking the, 
164 ; fearlessness of, as to traveling on 
ice, 203-204 ; in Coppermine River dis- 
trict, 211-213 ; vast herd of, to cross 
head waters of Dease River, 224-226; 
differences in appearance of eastern and 
western, 241-242 ; migrations of, 263, 
276, 502-503 ; observation of migration 
from Victoria Island, 277-278; worth- 
lessness of summer-killed skins of, 333- 
334, 448 ; description of summer hunt of, 
337-338 ; wind-drying and smoke-dry- 
ing the meat of, 338 ; uncertainty of 
migrations of, 348 ; contents of stom- 
achs of, as food, 446 ; parasitic in- 
sects on, 448 ; Dr. Anderson's notes 
on the Barren Ground caribou, 502 ff. 

Caribou skins, prices of, 62. 

Cascade Rapid, Athabasca River, 10, 15. 

Challenge, whaling schooner, 48, 84, 94, 
103, 118. 

Chandlar River, 438. 

Chewing gum, demand for, among Cape 
Smythe Eskimo, 387. 

Children, exposure of, among the Nagyuk- 
togmiut, 160 ; beliefs of Eskimo con- 
cerning guardian spirits of, 395-403. 

Chinook speech, 355. 

Chipewyan, Fort, 16. 

Chipewyan Indians, with Hearne at 
Bloody Fall, 208-209. 

Chipman, C. C, 7. 

Christianity, spread of, among Eskimo, 
37-39 ; among Colville River Indians, 
81-83 ; strange developments of, among 
the Eskimo, 89 ff., 415 ff. 

Christie, Hudson's Bay Company official, 
7, 12. 

Church of England missionaries in the 
Mackenzie Valley, 24-25. 

Clarke, James, 387. 

Clerk Island, 302-303, 307, 311-312. 



INDEX 



531 



Clothing, for Arctic climate, 77 ; eating 
of one's, in Arctic regions, 133 ; mis- 
guided views of Christianized Eskimo 
in regard to, 433-434. 

Clouds, use of, as a sky map, 298 n. 

Coal Creek, camping on, 339 ff., 345-362. 

Coal gas, experience with, in snow house, 
245-247. 

Coal outcrops, 440-441. 

Collinson, 4 ; the "Cape Kendall " of, 304- 
305. 

Collinson Point, 378-379. 

Colored glasses, 239. 

Colville Mountains, Victoria Island, 275- 
276. 

Colville River, Eskimo living on the, 80 ff. ; 
rise and fall of tide in the, 115; size 
of, 437. 

Comer, Captain George, on Hudson Bay 
tribes and the "Blond Eskimo," 202. 

Confidence, Fort, 224. 

Conversion of Eskimo, effect of, 408 ff. 

Cooper's Island, 51. 

Copper, knife of, among Dolphin and 
Union Straits Eskimo, 177 ; use of, in 
hunting implements, 248 ; traces of, 
found from Cape Lyon eastward, 441, 
442-443 ; in Victoria Island, 443. 

Copper Eskimo, summer spent with, 203- 
222 ; on Prince Albert Sound, 279-285, 
286 ff. 

Coppermine River, arrival at, 208 ; jour- 
ney along the, 211 ff. ; heat during 
summer in district of, 213 ; size of, 240- 
241 ; return trip down, 240-243. 

Coronation Gulf, 3, 121 ; moose seen at, 
28; journey to, from Cape Bexley, 
205 ff. ; characteristics of islands in, 
242-243, 443. 

Cottle, Captain S. F., 48, 118, 119, 122; 
cited concerning Clerk Island, 312; 
visit to, at Herschel Island, 378. 

Cram, Mr. and Mrs., 387. 

Cranes, observations of, 470-471. 

Crocker River, 307, 308, 309, 311, 312, 
313. 

D 

Dalhousie, Cape, 369. 

Dance, ceremonials attending an Eskimo, 

87-89 ; among the Dolphin and Union 

Straits Eskimo, 185-187. 
Darnley Bay, crossing of, 321. 
Darrell, Hubert, loss of, and notice of 

achievements of, 341-345. 
Davis, John, explorations of, 198. 
Dease and Simpson, reference to "Blond 

Eskimo" by, 200 ; visit of, to Rae River 

Eskimo, 207. 
Dease River, cosmopolitan Eskimo com- 



munity at headwaters of, 215-216; 
trip to mouth of, 223 ; migration of 
caribou across, 224-226. 

Dease Thompson, Point, 165, 316. 

Deer, black-tailed, 501. 

Demarcation Point, 31. 

De Salis Bay, 281. 

Dialects of Eskimo tribes, 251. See Lan- 
guage. 

Direction, inferiority of Eskimo in sense 
of, 146-150. 

Diseases among Indians of Mackenzie dis- 
trict, 22-24, 26. 

Dismal Lake, 207, 209; arrival at, 214; 
experience in fording, 215; second visit 
to, 237 ; description of, 238. 

Dogs, cruelty in treatment of, in the 
north, 11-12; food prejudices of, 111- 
112, 386. 

Dolphin and Union Straits, 3 ; crossing 
of, to Victoria Island, 188 ff., 261-262 ; 
return trip across, 302-310. 

Dolphin and Union Straits Eskimo, dis- 
covery of, 170-173 ; language of, 171, 
174-175 ; first day among, 175 ff. ; 
dances and songs of, 186-187 ; further 
consideration of, 188-202. 

Driftwood along Coronation Gulf, 243- 
244 ; found on westward-facing beaches, 
316; distribution of, on Dolphin and 
Union Straits and shores of Prince 
Albert Sound, 316-317. 

Drums, the musical instruments of the 
Eskimo, 186. 

Drying caribou meat, methods of, 338. 

Duchess of Bedford, Leffingwell-Mikkelsen 
Expedition schooner, 1. 

Ducks, Dr. Anderson's notes on, 461-466. 

Dumbness, warding off of, in presence of a 
spirit, 171. 

Dwight, Dr. Jonathan, Jr., 456, 485, 487. 



E 



Edmonton, arrival at, on way north, 6. 
Eider-ducks, 385, 464-465. 
Ekalluktogmiut Eskimo, 281, 287 ff. ; 

Hansen's misidentification of, 281- 

283. 
Ekalluktok River, 281. 
Elk, range of, 501. 
Ellice River, 227. 

Elvira, whaling and trading vessel, 388. 
Endicott Mountains, 334 ; crossing of, by 

Amundsen and by Hubert Darrell, 343- 

344. 
Equipment for expedition, 6. 
Eric the Red, discovery of Greenland by, 

195-196. 
Escape Reef, 377. 



532 



INDEX 



Eskimo, first experience in living with, 2 ; 
language of, 2 ; question of there being, 
on Victoria Island, 3, 4 ; possibility of 
existence of, hitherto undiscovered, 4 ; 
meeting with, at Fort Macpherson, 31, 
32 ; spread of Christianity among, and 
effects, 36-39 ; effect on, of introduc- 
tion of whaling industry, 39-40 ; folk- 
lore of the, 56-58 ; employed by whal- 
ing firms at Point Barrow, 60-61 ; 
notes of temperamental qualities of, 62- 
63, 207-208 ; disappearance of native, 
from northern Alaska, 66-67 ; compared 
with white men as to ability to stand 
cold, 75-79 ; winter houses of, 80 
acquiring the language of the, 85-86 
traces of early, about Cape Parry, 123 
inferiority of, to white men, in sense of 
locality, 146-148; so-called "instinc- 
tive" qualities of, 149; fear of, for the 
Nagyuktogmiut, 159, 163-164 ; dis- 
covery of Dolphin and Union Straits 
Eskimo, 170-173; "Blond," 173, 190- 
194 ; references to Blond Eskimo 
by early explorers, 199-200 ; possibility 
of descent of Blond Eskimo from Scan- 
dinavian colonists of Greenland, 200- 
201 ; improbability of various theories 
regarding derivation of Blond Eskimo, 
201-202 ; cosmopolitan gathering of, 
on Dease River, 215-216 ; meeting of 
Slavey Indians and, at Bear Lake, 217- 
219 ; disregard for promises among, 
271 ; discussion of religion of the, 390- 
407 ; discussion of effect of conversion 
on, 408 ff. 

Eskimo Lakes, 438. 

Eva, Hislop and Nagle's steamer, 17. 

Evans, Assistant School Superintendent, 
299, 300. 

Excavation of ruins, 313-314 ; at Langton 
Bay, 328-329, 330-332; at Cape 
Smythe, 387-388. 



F 



Ferguson, Sandy, 342. 

Fires, in Canadian forests, 10 ; Eskimo 
views of, in houses, 346-347. 

Firth, John, 31. 

Fishes, Dr. Anderson's notes on, 450-455. 

Fishing, among Copper Eskimo, 203 ; 
methods followed in, 450. 

Fitzgerald, Inspector, views of, on living 
on the country, 41 ; death of, from star- 
vation, 340-341. 

Flaxman Island, 44 ; Leffingwell's head- 
quarters at, 68, 379-380. 

Flies, notes on, 448. 

Folk-lore stories, study of, 56-58, 354, 363- 



364 ; writing of, in original Esldmo, 85- 
86 ; by the Eskimo Tannaumirk, 238. 

Food, shortcomings of lean meat as, 136— 
137, 140-141; of Dolphin and Union 
Straits Eskimo, 178-179. 

Food supplies of trading posts in Mac- 
kenzie district, 27. 

Food taboos, 151, 212, 410-411. 

Foot-wear of Eskimo, 79. 

Forests, waste of Canadian, by fire, 10; 
natural wealth of, in Mackenzie Valley, 
10-11. 

Forsythe Bay, 317. 

Fort, explanation of term, as applied to 
trading stations, 29. 

Foxes, -Arctic, 157, 517-519 ; practice of, 
of following polar bears for game, 351- 
352. 

Franklin, Sir John, reference to "Blond 
Eskimo" by, 199; memories of, among 
Coronation Gulf Eskimo, 252; needless 
starving of expedition of, 305. 

Franklin Bay, round trip to, from Dease 
River, 227-236. 

Frazer, Henry, 527. 

Freezing, precautionary measures against, 
75-79. 

Frost bites, treatment of, 75-79. 

Fry, Rev. Mr., Church of England mis- 
sionary, 370-372. 

Fuel problem about Point Barrow, 86-87. 

Fur, trapping for, among Eskimo, 350- 
351. 

Fur industry, 513-527. 



G 



Game, traces of, near Athabasca Lake, 16 ; 
conditions as to, at Fort Norman, 28 ; 
scarcity of, on Smith Bay, 55 ; near 
Point Dease Thompson, 165 ; re- 
marks on killing of, as a sport, 335. 
See Bears, Caribou, Mountain sheep, 
etc. 

Gaudetts, Timothy, 524. 

Geese, at Cape Halkett, 382-383; Dr. 
Anderson's notes on, 466-469. 

Giroux, Father, missionary at Fort 
Providence, 26. 

Glasses, for Arctic use, 239 ; importance 
of wearing, 385. 

Gordon, Thomas, home of, in America's 
farthest north, 45 ; sloop lent to author 
by, 49 ; story of the rescued Eskimo 
and, 96-98, 418 ; visit to, on return 
trip, 386. 

Grand Rapids Island, Athabasca River, 8. 

Grand Rapids of the Athabasca, 12, 14-15. 

Great Bear Lake, game conditions about, 
28-29; hunting by Eskimo along, 216; 



INDEX 



533 



visit of author to, to meet Melvill and 
Hornby, 216-220; Joseph Hodgson's 
-winter camp at, 223 ; hunting by Vic- 
toria Islanders at, 273. 

Greely, General A. W., researches of, 
in connection with "Blond Eskimo," 
199. 

Greenland, discovery of, by Scandina- 
vians and contact between Europeans 
and Eskimo in, 196-198 ; possibility of 
descent of "Blond Eskimo" from 
Scandinavian colonists of, 200-201. 

Grizzly bears, 127, 129, 333, 334-335, 
519 ff. 

Ground ice, 383-384. 

Grouse, 476. 

Gruben, John, 373. 

Gull rookeries west of Crocker River, 318. 

G\ills, Dr. Anderson's notes on, 459-461. 

Guninana, folk-lore stories of, 363-364, 
368. 

H 

Hadley, John, 46, 85, 387 ; adventure of, 

on an ice floe, 104-105. 
Halkett, Cape, 63, 381-382. 
Hall, Charles Francis, 250. 
Hamilton, Florence, 31. 
Hamilton, Maxfield, 20, 514. 
Hanbury, David T., 72; usefulness of 

work by, 249-250 ; errors of, due to 

poor interpreters, 250-251, 252 ; traces 

of, among Prince Albert Sound Eskimo, 

285 ; Hubert Darrell with, 342. 
Haneragmiut, tribe of the, 190. 
Hansen, Lieutenant Gotfred, 72 ; mis- 
take of, regarding Ekalluktogmiut 

Eskimo, 281-283. 
Harbors west of Crocker River, 317-318. 
Hare, the Arctic, 211, 514-515. 
Harrison Bay, crossing of, 381-382. 
Hawkesworth, Mr. and Mrs. Charles, 46, 

85, 94, 413-414. 
Hawks, notes on, 478. 
Hay River, mission at mouth of, 22-25 ; 

trading station at, 27. 
Hearne, Samuel, expedition of, at Bloody 

Fall, 208-209. 
Herring, taking of, in nets, 452. 
Herschel Island, 2 ; arrival at, 37 ; visit 

to, on return trip, 377-378 ; formation 

and contour of, 378. 
Hills, in Coronation Gulf region, 242-243, 

443 ; in country east of Mackenzie 

River, 439. 
Hislop and Nagle Trading Company, 32, 

34. 
Hitkoak, Victoria Island Eskimo, 286, 

289. 
Hodgson, Joseph, 21, 223, 227, 237; on 



habitat of moose, 501 ; on muskrats, 
513; on the otter, 523. 

Hopson, Fred, 46. 

Hornby, John, 20 ; at Bear Lake, 216, 
220, 223, 236. 

Horton River, 126 ; discovery of a branch 
of, 129 ; size of, 227 ; trip down, on 
journey to Franklin Bay, 230-232; 
coal veins on, 440-441 ; minerals along 
the, 441. 

House, stone, on Victoria Island, 274. 

Houses, of Eskimo about Point Barrow, 
86-87 ; new and old, of snow, 245 ; 
pernicious practice of building frame, 
by Eskimo, 299-300 ; nature of modern 
Eskimo snow houses, 314-315; sodding 
of, 346. 

House ruins, prehistoric, along Dolphin 
and Union Straits, 314; at Langton 
Bay, 329, 330-332; at Cape Smythe, 
388. 

Hudson's Bay Company, 7, 19 ; present 
conditions at posts of, compared with 
past, 26-27; "fish posts" and "meat 
posts," 27; so-called "forts" of the, 
29 ; able handling of problems of the 
North by, 30. 

Hulahula River, 437, 438, 508. 

Hupgok brothers, 266. 



Ice, break-up of, in Athabasca Lake, 18 ; 
break-up of, in Slave Lake, 24 ; dura- 
tion of, in Mackenzie River, 28 ; move- 
ment of, in Arctic Ocean north of Alaska, 
47 ; quality of freshness of old salt- 
water ice, 115-116; action of fresh- 
water, on melting, 322-323 ; action of 
salt-water, 325 ; formation of ground 
ice, 383-384 ; formation of under- 
ground, by rivers, 384-385. 

Ice crystals, fresh-water, 322-323. 

Icy Cape, Eskimo dance at, 87-89. 

Iglihsirk, Coronation Gulf Eskimo, 251- 
252. 

Iglorak, sandspit of, 51. 

Ilavinirk, Eskimo employee, 35, 52, 60, 
64, 70, 98, 101, 106 ff., 117, 131 ff., 150, 
151, 326 ff., 353 ; exposition of religious 
views of Eskimo by, 419-423, 435. 

Indians, improvidence of northern, in 
clothes and food, 18-19 ; language, cus- 
toms, and religion of, along Mackenzie 
River, 20-21 ; tuberculosis among, due 
to misguided missionarj' teachings, 22- 
24 ; questionable effects of education 
on, 25-26 ; divergent views concerning 
in the South and in the North, 30 ; 
attitude of Colville River Eskimo 



534 



INDEX 



toward, 114; meeting between Eskimo 
and, at Bear Lake, 217-219. 

Insanity, case of, at Baillie Islands, 365. 

Insects, notes on, 448-449. 

Instinctive qualities, so called, in primi- 
tive peoples, 149. 

Introductions among Victoria Island 
Eskimo, 172, 190-191. 

Iron pyrites, Horton River district, 441. 

Itkillik River, 80, 115. 

Ivory, articles of, found in archEeological 
excavations, 330, 332. 

Ivory gulls, 459. 

Ivy, whaling schooner, 103. 

lyituaryuk, Baillie Islands Eskimo, 364, 
367. 



Jaegers, observation of and notes on, 385, 

458-459. 
Jardine River, 227. 
Jarvis, Major A. M., 31, 32. 
Jays, observations of, 481-482. 
Jeanette, whaling vessel, 47, 48. 
John and Winthrop, whaling vessel, 389. 
John the Sailmaker, 158. 
Johnson, missionary at Slave Lake, 24. 
Jones, H. W., cited on birds, 462, 463, 

464, 470, 471, 473, 477-483, 485, 493; 

flying squirrels in collection of, 511. 
Jones Islands, 381, 382. 
Joseph, Captain, 389. 



K 



Kagloryuak River, 281. 

Kaiariok, musk-ox skin sled made by, 256. 

Kanghirgyuargmiut Eskimo, Prince Albert 

Sound, 279. 
Karluk, whaling vessel, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 

118, 119, 378. 
Keats, Point, harbor at, 318. 
Kendall, "Cape," 302, 304, 305, 306. 
Kendall River, 214, 238 ; measurements 

of, 241. 
Killinermiut tribe, 281-283. 
King Point, relics of Amundsen at, 37. 
Kirkpuk, Puiplirgmiut Eskimo, 267, 270- 

271. 
Kitirkolak, Victoria Island Eskimo, 286, 

288. 
Kittegaryuit, mission at, 373-374. 
Klinkenberg, Captain Charles, 3-4, 103, 

306. 
Knife, gift to author, of a historic, 365- 

367. 
Kommana, story of knife given to author 

by, 365-367. 
Koodlalook, Annie, assistant to missionary 

at Cape Smythe, 46, 85, 94, 387. 



Kotzebue Sound, spread of Christianity 

from, 38, 415. 
Kugum Panga, village site known as, 331. 
Kugurak River, 437. 
Kunaluk, Eskimo helper, 49, 50, 52, 53, 

54, 64. 
Kunasluk, father of Pikaluk, 131, 133, 

136. 
Kuparuk River, herds of caribou at, 67, 

116. 
Kutukak, father-in-law of Natkusiak, 340. 



Lambart, Frederick, 520. 

Lambert Island, crossing Dolphin and 
Union Straits to, 261-262 ; Eskimo on, 
264. 

Lamps of stone, 248, 249. 

Langton Bay, description of, 125-126 ; 
defects as a wintering place, 126 ; 
start from, for the unknown east, 159- 
161 ; journey to, from Bear Lake, 223- 
233 ; difficulties of return to, after 
Victoria Island trip, 320-326. 

Language, of the Eskimo, 2, 250-251, 354- 
359 ; of Indians along Mackenzie River, 
21 ; study of Eskimo, at Cape Smythe, 
85 ; of Dolphin and Union Straits 
Eskimo, 171, 174-175; study of the 
Esldmo, during winter of 1911-1912, 
353 ff. 

Leavitt, Captain George, 48, 253. 

Leffingwell, E. de K., 49, 68, 102, 369, 
379 ; meeting with, at Flaxman Island, 
44 ; work done by, in geology and in 
cartography, 379-380, 437-438. 

Lefhngwell-Mikkelsen Arctic Expedition, 
1. 

Leighton, first mate of the Olga, 84, 98. 

Limestone, deposits of, 441, 442. 

Lindy, faithful dog, 75. 

Ling, favorite food fish of Eskimo, 455. 

Liverpool Ba5^ crossing of, 369. 

Locality, Esldmo lacking in sense of, 146- 
150. 

Loons on Arctic coast, 456-458. 

Lopp, Superintendent of Schools, 299. 

Loutit, Peter, 467. 

Lutz, Frank E., 449. 

Lynx, the Northern Canada, 515. 

Lyon, Cape, 161, 311, 316, 317; sharp 
angle of, 318-319. 



M 



MacFarlane, Roderick, 526. 
Mclntyre, "Scotty," 3S0. 
Mackenzie River, comparison of Yukon 
and, 17-18 ; trip down the, 20 S. ; 



INDEX 



535 



missions and missionaries in district 
of the, 22-25 ; conditions as to health, 
agriculture, and food supplies in dis- 
trict, 26-28 ; approach of spurs of 
Rocky Mountains to the, 28 ; ice 
season on the, 28 ; game conditions in 
valley of the, 28-29 ; delta of the, 438. 
Mackenzie River, steamer, 17, 18, 33, 34. 
Mackinlay, James, 20, 21. 
MacLeod brothers, story of the, 14-15. 
MacMurray, Fort, 8, 15. 
Macpherson, Fort, arrival at, 31. 
Macu (masu) roots as food, 295 n., 445- 

446. 
Mamavauk, wife of Ilavinirk, 54, 70, 131, 

133, 134, 325-326, 353. 
Mammals, Dr. Anderson's notes on, 494- 

527. 
Mammoth, Eskimo explanation of ex- 
tinction of the, 422. 
Mangilanna, Esldmo helper, 331, 333. 
Marmot, the hoary, 510. 
Marsh, Dr. H. R., medical missionary at 
Point Barrow, 22-24, 46 ; command 
of Eskimo tongue by, 85 ; events lead- 
ing to demand by Eskimo for recall of, 
89-94, 430-433. 
Matches, account of shortage of, at Pler- 
schel Island, 41 ff . ; discovery of Es- 
kimo who had never seen, 173. 
Mayoriak River, 58. 
Measles, deadliness of, among Indians of 

Mackenzie district, 26. 
Melvill, C. D., 20; at Bear Lake, 216, 

220, 223, 236. 
Melvill Mountains, 126, 302-303, 315-316. 
Memoranna, 142, 143, 151, 153, 154, 157. 
Mercredi, Pierre, 501. 
Mice in the Arctic, 512-513. 
Midnight Sun, Athabasca River steamer, 

8. 
Migrations, of caribou, 29, 263, 276, 502- 

503 ; of muskrats, 29. 
Mills, Captain J. W., 18, 480. 
Minerals, Dr. Anderson's report on, 440- 

443. 
Minto Inlet, 3 ; people of, 287. 
Mirages, Arctic, 72-73. 
Missionaries, work of, in combating 
tuberculosis among Indians of Mac- 
kenzie Valley, 22-24 ; results of Roman 
Catholic and Church of England, com- 
pared, 24-25 ; attitude of Eskimo to- 
ward, 92-93 ; results of work of, among 
Eskimo, 408 ff. 
Mogg, Captain William, 63-64, 84. 
Moose, signs of, near Athabasca Lake, 16 ; 
movement of, at Fort Norman, 28-29 ; 
notes on habitat and numbers, 501-502. 
Morgan, cook at Cape Smythe, 85. 



Moses, Enoch, 377. 

Mosquitoes, the plague of the northern 

forest, 7, 448 ; on Athabasca River, 16 ; 

on north coast of Alaska, 113 ; in Cop- 
permine River district, 213. 
Mountain sheep. Fort Norman, 28 ; 

south of Barter Island, 69 ; taboos 

concerning meat of, 410-411 ; range of, 

and numbers, 508-510. 
Mounted police, at Fort Macpherson, 31 ; 

hospitality of, at Herschel Island, 377- 

378. 
Mourning doves, 477. 
Murdoch, pottery discoveries by, 327, 328. 
Musk-oxen, on Victoria Island, 289 ; 

general conditions relative to, 506-507. 
Muskrats, migration of, to the northeast, 

29 ; notes on, 513-514. 
Myths, explanation of origin of, among 

the Eskimo, 252-255. 



N 



Nagle, Mr., 22, 31. 

Nagyuktogmiut, people of the caribou 
antler, 159, 163, 248. 

Narwhal, whaling ship, 47, 48, 49. 253, 
497. 

Natkusiak, Eskimo companion, 73, 74, 75, 
81, 83, 94, 95, 97, 111, 117, 124, 127, 
128, 130, 144-145, 148, 150, 151, 156- 
157, 162, 189 ff., 206, 211, 212, 213, 216, 
224-226, 227 ff., 239 ff., 253-254, 259 ff., 
301 ff., 320 ff., 387 ; excellence of, as a 
hunter, 148 ; unlike other Eskimo in pos- 
sessing taste for adventure, 152; leaves 
service of author temporarily, 340 ; at- 
tack of snow- blindness, 385 ; suffers 
from felon on hand, 380-381. 

Natural gas in Athabasca Valley, 15. 

Nelson Head, 281, 289. 

Niakonak, Eskimo camp at, 35. 

Nichols, John T., 451, 452, 453, 454, 455. 

Nirlik, trading village of, 113-114. 

Noahanirgmiut Eskimo on Lambert Island, 
264-271. 

Noashak, daughter of Ilavinirk, 131, 333 ; 
Esldmo beliefs concerning children 
illustrated by, 395-400. 

Norman, Fort, game conditions at, 28. 

North Star, trading schooner, 369, 370, 
372. 

Norwood, Captain, 497. 

Nunatagmiut people, explanation con- 
cerning, 282-283. 



O 



O'Connor, E. B. ("Duffy"), 379. 

Oil, promise of, in Athabasca Valley, 15. 



536 



INDEX 



Okat, place called, 153. 

Okpilak River, 437. 

Okuk, Baillie Islands Eskimo, 142. 

Olga, whaling and trading schooner, 3, 63- 

64, 84, 306 ; at Victoria Island (in 1906), 

202. 
Oliktok, point called, 64, 115. 
Oniyak, Christianized Eskimo, and his 

heathen father, 419-420. 
Oolahoola River, 69. 
Otter, the Canadian, 523. 
Ovayuak, Eskimo chief, 32, 374 ; bathing 

customs at house of, 375-376. 
Owls, notes on, 478-479. 
Oyarayak, 71, 73. 



Palaiyak, adopted son of Ilavinirk, 131, 
136, 137, 143, 326, 333, 348 ff. 

Pamiungittok, Victoria Island Eskimo, 
286-287. 

Pannigabluk, Eskimo seamstress and 
helper, 117, 126, 130, 134, 136, 151, 157, 
- 158, 162, 169, 211, 212, 227, 237, 336, 
359. 

Panniulak, Eskimo leader, 82. 

Parry, Cape, 36 ; location of, 121 ; land- 
ing at, 121 ; traces of early inhabitants 
about, 123 ; illness of Dr. Anderson at, 
144-146 ; swan-breeding grounds on, 
324. 

Partridges, 475. 

Peace River, 16. 

Pedersen, Captain, 48, 94, 103, 118, 122, 
388. 

Peel River, 31. 

Pelican Portage, 12. 

Pelican rookeries, 20, 461. 

Pictures, an Eskimo's collection of, 82. 

Pierce, Point, 163, 316; excellent ship 
harbor at, 317-318. 

Pikaluk, Eskimo employee, 131, 144, 145, 
157-158. 

Pitt Point, 383. 

Plants, notes on, 445-448. 

Plovers, 385, 474-475. 

Point Barrow, visit to, 45-46 ; fuel prob- 
lem about, 86-87 ; visit to, on return 
trip, 386-389 ; passing of economic 
independence at, 387 ; archaeological 
specimens obtained at, 387-388. 

Polar bears, 126, 165-167, 311, 522. 

Porter, Captain, of the Jeanette, 48. 

Potatoes, farthest north for growing of, 26. 

Potlatch, holding of a, among Alaskan 
Eskimo, 87-89. 

Pot-ston3, location of, 442. 

Pottery, important discoveries of, 327- 
329. 



Prayers among the Eskimo, 81-82, 97, 

415-416. 
Preble, E. A., 511. 
Prince Albert Sound, arrival at, 278 ; 

Eskimo village on, 279 ; distribution 

of drift-wood on, 316-317. 
Prince Patrick Sound, 306. 
Promises, weight of, among Eskimo, 271. 
Providence, Fort, mission school at, 25 ; 

agricultural products at, 26 ; trading 

station at, 27. 
Prudden, Hudson's Bay Company trader, 

523. 
Ptarmigan, habits of, 112; rock, on 

Victoria Island, 289 ; about Coal 

Creek, 348 ; Dr. Anderson's notes on, 

476-477. 
Public opinion, force of, among Eskimo, 

365. 
Puiplirgmiut Eskimo, 266-273. 



R 



Rabbits, as article of food for Indians, 27- 
28 ; numbers and habitat, 514-515. 

Rae, Dr. John, excellence of work of ex- 
ploration of, 304-305. 

Rae River Eskimo, visit to village of, 206- 
208. 

Rapids, running of, in Athabasca River, 
8-10. 

Rasmussen, Knud, cited, 429. 

Reeve, Bishop, 7, 22. 

Religion of the Eskimo, 37-39, 81-83, 
89 ff., 390 ff. 

Repulse Bay, Rae at, 305. 

Resolution, Fort, trading station at, 27. 

Revenue cutters, timidity of, 47-48. 

Rice, an Eskimo's estimate of, 102. 

Richard Island, 373, 374, 438; geese at, 
467. 

Richardson, Sir John, 3, 121, 161, 312, 
315 ; visit of, to Rae River Eskimo, 
207 ; account of discovery of Clerk 
Island by, 302, 303 ; conservatism of 
estimates by, 304 ; Torso Rock of, 316 ; 
burning cliffs noted by, 439. 

Rifles, cheapness of, at Point Barrow, 61. 

Rivers, North Alaskan, 437-438. 

Rock ptarmigan, 289, 348, 477. 

Rocky Mountains, spurs of, in Mac- 
kenzie Valley, 28 ; spur of, in northern 
Alaska, 65-66. 

Rodents, Dr. Anderson's notes on, 510- 
515. 

Roman Catholic missionaries in the 
Mackenzie Valley, 24-25. 

Ronciere le Noury, mythical River la, 124- 
125, 331. 

Rosie H., whaling ship, 48, 53, 67, 68, 69, 



INDEX 



537 



119-120, 121, 149-150, 157, 341, 369; 

voyage to Cape Parry in, 119-120. 
Routledge, Major W. H., 19; estimates 

by, on number of buffalo, 506. 
Ruins, excavation of, 313-314, 328-329, 

330-332, 387-388. 
Rydberg, P. A., 446. 



S 



Sabbath, fanatical observance of, by Es- 
kimo, 36-37, 89-93, 95-96, 374-375, 
416-419, 425-427. 

Salmon trout, 453. 

Salt, mined in Salt River bed, 20 ; living 
without, 69-70 ; dislike of Eskimo for, 70. 

Sanderson, Johnny, Slavey Indian com- 
panion, 227-234 ; otter slides seen by, 523. 

Sandpipers, 472-473. 

"Savage," use of word, for "child-like" 
peoples, 390. 

Schools for Indians in the Mackenzie 
district, 25-26. 

Scott, Lieutenant Philip H., 389. 

Sculpins, common along Arctic coast, 455. 

Seal-oil as food, 132, 136-137. 

Seals, method of stalking, 108-111 ; habits 
of, in winter, 170 ; primitive method of 
hunting, among Copper Eskimo, 205- 
206 ; large number of, in Dolphin and 
Union Straits, 267 ; bearded, 267-269 ; 
rules concerning division of bearded, 
269; in Darnley Bay, 321; Dr. An- 
derson's notes on, 525-527. 

Selig, Sergeant, 31, 37, 341, 458, 481. 

Shamanism, 184-185, 255, 274, 290-293, 
372-373, 391-395, 412-413, 430. 

Shamanistic flight, description of a, 403- 
407. 

Sharavanktok River, 437. 

Shaving, necessity of, in Arctic regions, 
77-78. 

Shingle Point, camp at, 35-36. 

Shrews, 527. 

Sign language among Eskimo, 279-280. 

Silver foxes, 327, 517. 

Simpson Bay, Eskimo at, 271-273. 

Sinclair, J. E., 86, 299. 

Skin-boats, Eskimo, 105-106. 

Slate, Harry, 344, 345. 

Slave Lake, crossing of, 22. 

Slave River, 16, 17. 

Slavey Indians at Bear Lake, 217-219. 

Sled from musk-ox skin, 256. 

Sledges, fragments of, found on south 
shore of Dolphin and Union Straits, 315. 

Smith, Fort, arrival at, 17, 20. 

Smith Bay, 54 ; wintering on coast of, 
65 ff. ; found to be the delta of a large 
river, 58. 



Smith Landing, 17. 

Smith Rapids, 17. 

Smoking Mountains, Franklin Bay, 439. 

Snow-blindness, 239, 385-386. 

Snow houses of Eskimo, 86, 245, 314-315. 

Sod house. Coal Creek camp, 346-347. 

Soldat, Jimmie, Slavey Indian at Bear 

Lake, 217-219. 
Songs of Dolphin and Union Straits 

Eskimo, 186. 
Spermophiles, notes on, 510-511. 
Spirit flight, belief in, 403-407. 
Spirits, Eskimo beliefs concerning, 397 ff. 

iSee Shamanism. 
Spriggs, Mr., 85. 
Spruce trees, location and characteristics, 

444-445. 
Squirrels, 211, 511. 

Stein, Chris, trader and trapper, 35, 389. 
Stewart, Elihu, forestry commissioner, 10, 

12. 
Stivens, Point, 153. 
Stone, utensils and lamps of, 248-249. 
Storkerson, Storker, 49, 50, 52, 53, 68, 

100, 101, 103, 377. 
Stupart, R. F., 6. 

Superstition, prevalence of, among Vic- 
toria Islanders, 295-297. 
Swans, nests and eggs of, 113, 469-470; 

breeding grounds of, at Cape Parry, 

324. 



Taboo, the Sunday, 374-375, 416-419, 
425-427. 

Taboos, 264-265, 410-412; analogy be- 
tween prohibitions of Christian teach- 
ings and, in Eskimo minds, 89 ; test of 
theory concerning separation of land 
industries and sea animals by, 265-266. 

Tangent, Point, 53. 

Tannaumirk, Mackenzie River Eskimo, 
142, 143, 145, 146, 162, 168, 169, 171, 
172, 180, 211, 224-226, 227, 238, 239, 
259, 336 ff., 348 ff., 362; lack of sense 
of direction shown by, 146-147 ; folk- 
lore stories of, 238 ; experience of, with 
coal gas poisoning, 245-247 ; religious 
opinions held by, 423-424. 

Tasirkpuk, lake called, 58. 

Tattooing for killing men and killing 
whales, 367. 

Teddy Bear, appearance of, in Coronation 
Gulf, 258 ; arrival at Langton Bay, 336 ; 
in winter quarters at Cape Bathurst, 369. 

Tern, common and Arctic, 461. 

Terraces on hills and islands. Coronation 
Gulf region, 242-243. 

Thetis (Jones) Islands, 382. 

Thetis, U. S. Revenue Cutter, 47. 



538 



INDEX 



Thrasher, whaling ship, 47. 

Tilton, Captain James, 48. 

Tin cans, value of, to Eskimo, 237. 

Tinney, Point, 303, 307, 308. 

Torso Rock, Sir John Richardson's, 316. 

Tracking a boat, 35. 

Treaty money and treaty parties, 21. 

Trees, report on, 443-445. 

Trout, salmon and lake, 453. 

Tuberculosis among Mackenzie Valley 
Indians, 22-24. 

Tunes, Nicolas, reference to "Blond Es- 
kimo" by, 199. 

Tununirohirmiut Eskimo, 284. 

U 

Ugyugligmiut people, north of Minto 

Inlet, 287-288. 
Ungasiktagmiut Eskimo, 248. 
Utkusiksaligmiut people, 249. 



Vale, Rev. Mr., missionary at Slave Lake, 
22, 24. 

Victoria Island, 3 ; supposed uninhabited 
condition of, 4 ; visit to people of, 188 ff. 
the "Blond Eskimo" of, 188-202 
proximity of, to Greenland, 200 
knowledge about, among Coronation 
Gulf Eskimo, 251-252; crossing of, 
273 &. ; course followed, 275 ; moun- 
tains on, 275-276 ; extracts from diary 
concerning, 287-299 ; shamanism and 
superstition among people of, 290-297 ; 
return trip from, 301 ff. ; lack of drift- 
wood on, 317. 

Village sites, excavation of, at Point 
Barrow, 387-388. 

Volcanoes, mud, in country east of 
Mackenzie River, 439. 

W 

Wainwright Inlet, visit to, 86. 
Walliraluk Island, 278, 297. 



Walrus, numbers and habitat, 525-526. 
Washing among Christianized Eskimo, 

375-377, 415. 
West River, country south of, 136. 
Whale, taking of a bowhead, 119. 
Whalebone, loss of market for, 119 n. 
Whales, poisoning from eating fresh meat 

of, 32-33, 35; tattooing for killing of, 

367. 
Whaling industry among Eskimo, 39, 496- 

500 ; collapse of, and disastrous effects 

on Eskimo, 40, 119. 
Whaling ships, the first to reach Herschel 

Island, 39 ; at Point Barrow, 47-48. 
White foxes, 517-518. 
White whale, taking of the, 500. 
Whittaker, Rev. C. E., 31, 33, 370, 422, 

428, 488. 
Wiik, magnetician with Amundsen, 37. 
Wing, Captain James, 40, 42, 44. 
Wise, Point, signs of unknown Eskimo at, 

167. 
Wissler, Dr. Clark, 4. 
Wolf, meat of, as food, 151, 212; killing 

of a white, on Horton River, 240. 
Wolki, Captain Fritz, 48, 53, 100, 119, 

150, 157, 158, 361, 369; cited on birds, 

456, 462, 464, 481. 
Wolverines, in Horton River district, 134, 

139 ; habitat, skin, and habits, 524- 

525. 
Wolves, range, color, and hunting habits, 

516. 
Women of the Nagyuktogmiut, 159- 

160. 
Wood buffalo, 19-20, 506. 
Woodpeckers, 479-480. 
Wrigley, Fort, tuberculosis at, 24. 
Wrigley, Mackenzie River steamer, 17, 18. 



Young, Point, 168. 

Young, Rev. Mr., missionary at Mac- 
kenzie delta, 369, 374. 

Yukon River, comparison of Mackenzie 
River and, 17-18. 



' I 'HE following pages contain advertisements of a 
few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects 



ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND DESCRIPTION 

Hunting the Elephant in Africa 

By captain C. H. STIGAND 

With an Introduction by Colonel Theodore Roosevelt and Illustrations 
made from photographs taken by the author 

Decorated cloth, 8vo, $2.^0 net 

For a period of more than thirteen years the author of this 
work has hunted big game in the jungles of East Africa. Here 
are told simply and with an attractive modesty, yet dramatically, 
some of his most remarkable experiences. It is an old-fashioned 
animal hunting book with real thrills in it and revealing many new 
points on the habits of the beasts of a wild country. Captain 
Stigand is no "nature fakir"; his work is consequently a robust 
one in which is embodied the spirit of the real hunter. Colonel 
Roosevelt has written an introduction for the volume, which is 
illustrated by a number of very interesting pictures made from 
photographs taken by the author. 



The Barbary Coast 



By albert EDWARDS 

Author of " Panama," " Comrade Yetta," etc. With many Illustrations 

Decorated cloth, l2mo, $2.00 net 

Albert Edwards's " Panama : The Canal, the Country and the 
People " has gone into many editions and received wide and favor- 
able comment. Much may, therefore, be expected of this new 
descriptive volume, in which Mr. Edwards relates some of his re- 
markable and always interesting experiences in the states of northern 
Africa. Mr. Edwards does not write with a history or a book at 
his elbow ; what he says does not come to the reader from a second- 
hand knowledge. He has been in Africa himself and he writes out 
of his own life. 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF TRAVEL, ADVENTURE, AND DESCRIPTION 

America As I Saw It 

By E. ALEC-TWEEDIE 

With illustrations, Decorated cloth, 8vo, $3.00 net 

Many books have been written by people who 
have visited this country and have then returned to 
their native heath, but it is doubtful whether any 
one has gone at the task with such an abundance 
of good humor as has the author of this sprightly 
volume. Mrs. Tweedie says things, to be sure, about 
America and Americans that will not be wholly ac- 
ceptable, but she says them in such a way that even 
the most sensitive cannot take offence. In fact, it 
is quite likely that her criticisms will provoke laugh- 
ter as good humored in itself as the remarks which 
cause it. There is hardly a spot on the broad con- 
tinent that does not pass under Mrs. Tweedie's ex- 
amination, and scarcely a person of importance. She 
finds much to praise openly, but amusing as it may 
seem, these praiseworthy factors are not those upon 
which we expect commendation. Our dinners, our 
clubs, our educational systems, our transportation 
facilities, our home life, our theatres, our books, our 
art, — all are analyzed, and upon them " Tweedie ver- 
dicts " are passed. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



ILLUSTRATED BOOKS OF TRAVEL. ADVENTURE, AND DESCRIPTION 

A History of Land Mammals 
in the Western Hemisphere 

By W. B. SCOTT 

Author of "Introduction to Geology" 

With many illustrations made from paintings by W. B. Horsfall and others 

Decorated cloth, 8vo, $S-00 net 

For nearly half a century a constant and ever-widening stream 
of discovery has brought to Hght a multitude of the animal forms 
which successively inhabited North and South America, but long 
ago vanished from the earth. This wonderful mammalian history 
has been slowly and laboriously deciphered by many workers and 
the results of their investigations are scattered widely through the 
scientific journals of nearly every European language and are thus 
inaccessible to the general educated public. It is highly desirable 
to bring together the more significant of these results in a form 
which shall be intelligible to the reader who is interested in the 
progress of science, but cannot make use of technical papers. 
After a discussion of the methods of investigation, a sketch is 
given of the geographical history of the western hemisphere and of 
the mammalian groups which successively inhabited it. This is 
followed by a series of chapters dealing with the evolution of 
those land mammals whose history is known, and finally are 
described the inferences as to the operation of the evolutionary 
process which may be drawn from the study of these histories. 
The numerous illustrations by Mr. Bruce Horsfall and Mr. 
Charles Knight make the marvellous tale of development clear 
with a minimum of technical description. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



0- 

The Highways and Byways Series 



Highways and Byways from the 
St. Lawrence to Virginia 

By CLIFTON JOHNSON 

With many illustrations made from photographs taken by the author 

Tourist edition, decorated doth, ismo, $1.30 net 

As in the case of the other volumes in this series Mr. Johnson 
deals here primarily with country life — especially that which is 
typical and picturesque. The author's trips have taken him to 
many characteristic and famous regions ; but always both in text 
and pictures he has tried to show nature as it is and to convey 
some of the pleasure he experienced in his intimate acquaintances 
with the people. There are notes giving valuable information 
concerning automobile routes and other facts of interest to tourists 
in general. 

Tourist Editions of The Highways and Byways Series 



Highways and Byways of the South 

By CLIFTON JOHNSON 

Tourist edition, illustrated, decorated cloth, l2ino, $1.^0 net 

Highways and Byways of the Pacific Coast 

By CLIFTON JOHNSON 

Tourist edition, illustrated, decorated cloth, l2mo, $i.SO net 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



